People seem to be under the impression that magic just lets you solve your problems with a wave of your hand and a couple of words in arcane language, as though the laws of physics just ceased to apply to Wizards. I wish. No, the sad reality is that a magical force of equal or greater is required to alter the state of any given object moving through space. I have the ability to impose my will upon the world around me, but the imposition needs to be commensurate with what I'm trying to do.
Using wind to close a door or kick something into my hand? That's easy. Knocking over some mook between me and what I want to do? That's harder. Tossing aside some group of supernatural nasties? That's even harder. Re-directing a crashing helicopter in real time while trying to stop myself from falling out the side of the aforementioned helicopter? That's damn near impossible.
I'd love to tell you that I did something particularly Wizardly or Godly to save us, but the reality is that I fell forward hard enough to break my neck, just barely managing to grab one of the Russians by their combat webbing and stop myself from falling out the open side doors. I resisted the overpowering sense of nausea as my head buffeted about in the wind, twisting in every direction at once.
"What in the fuck?" Screeched the terrified Russian – the one who'd been so interested to talk to me about Nekheb. My head got stuck between his combat webbing and the belt, fixing my vision in place over the man's name tag.
"Sergei. Shove my head back in place." I spoke to the man, my voice muffled against the man's chest. "I'll be fine, but I need my head back on straight."
"This is so wrong." The man griped as he twisted my head back into place. I felt a wave of relief as my head snapped back into alignment against my spine.
"Thank you." I spoke to the young man as I wrapped my staff-arm in the hanging webbing to fix myself in place, summoning my power to blast our craft up and away from the jagged rocks. I fixed my gaze upon them, trying to figure out how much time I had to cast a spell – trying to figure out a safe trajectory away from them.
There wasn't one.
Near as I could tell we'd fallen off the edge of the Nevernever and down towards an endless sea of obsidian spikes pulsing with violet light. The best I could hope to do would be to slow our impact enough to cushion our fall, and even that seemed dubiously connected to safety judging by the crimson lightning arcing between the jagged spires. It formed odd pockets of luminosity as the electrical discharge connected with the flowing pockets of gas, rainbows of fire shimmering around the knife-points of stone.
A man screamed in pain from my left and I felt my heart stop as I watched my brother's fall out the side, his seatbelt breaking from the wall. The man had greatly enhanced reflexes and strength, but he needed something solid underneath him for them to do him any good. I just got to watch some supernaturally fast flailing as he plummeted out the side.
Fortunately for Thomas, Ammit had a much more solid position. Unfortunately for him, she wasn't inclined to be especially gentle with the vampire. Ammit snagged Thomas as he pitched forward, her long talons digging deep into his side. He screamed in agony, gripping her arm hard enough to break the skin, but neither predator let go of the other in spite of their obvious pain.
I could feel the waves of desire Thomas was unconsciously pumping out towards Ammit, and really didn't like the way she was licking her lips as the yellow glow of her eyes matched the silver glow of his own. There was no way that the orange glow coming from where the blood met between Ammit's glowing green and Thomas' sanguine pink wasn't going to end up biting me in the ass if I allowed that to keep happening.
I didn't want to put too much power into the spell to slow us down or I would risk collapsing the already stressed cockpit and killing the pilots, but I risked killing us all if I didn't use enough power. I focused on an image in my mind of a cushion of air beneath us, pressing up and gently slowing us. Clasping my staff firmly in my hand, I shouted the words of power I'd spoken a thousand times before. "Ventas Servitas!"
And then something odd happened. Just as the power pooled into a massive, visible cloud of wind, things started to slow down around me. The closer we got to that purple light on the ground below us, the less that time seemed to have any connection to the world around me. I looked at Kincaid, trying to figure out what the man was shouting over the howling winds and screaming motor of the aircraft. His mouth was opened in a scream as he pointed up at a wall of flames building up above us. The helicopter's engine, torn free of its rotor blades appeared to have suffered catastrophic enough damage to set alight. As Kincaid's finger began to lower, his mouth formed into a ridiculous caricature of a word. Just the one. "Gas!"
"Hell's bells." I snarled, realizing that some parts of the aircraft's hull were already glowing red from the combined petrol and electrical malfunctions. "That's… that's really bad."
I wasn't sure what was in the billowing cloud of air I'd summoned to slow our descent, but dollars to doughnuts it would ignite upon contact. I could try to disperse the wind, but that would just throw us back into the same situation we'd started, falling to our deaths.
Only one thing for it. "Aparturum!"
As the window to the real world opened below us in a shimmering disk through the center of reality, I reached up to the engine and blasted the thing out of the helicopter with a burst of kinetic force. I'd judged, rightly, that my bursts of force were as accelerated as the rest of me – allowing me to remove most of the burning wreckage from our now roofless aircraft.
Our helicopter, which really was just a glorified sled at this point, fired back into the real world. The Nevernever, always glad to throw me for a loop, fired us out of the realms of faerie. In the exact opposite direction of the way we'd previously been falling, of course. The flaming wreckage of our helicopter fired up and into the star-strewn skies. My companions, who had not been privy to my own accelerated experiences in the time stream, caught up to me in an instant – reacting to the whiplash between environments with a mix of fear and confusion.
No longer fearing the combination of explosive gasses and flames I summoned a mighty gust of wind with another shout of "Ventas Servitas," to bend the elements to my will. There was a confusing degree of symmetry between the spell and desires of my mantle, the roiling well of prayers at the edge of my thoughts almost humming with the sheer audacity of it. The buffeting winds met us in a roiling mess of wind and sand that our damage craft surfed along till we set down at the foot of the high dunes. Our craft skidded to a gentle stop along the sands, an incongruously soft landing compared to the horrific degree of damage that had been done to our craft.
I untangled myself from the craft and rushed over the interlocked predators, feeling the waves of hunger rolling off of Thomas with mounting dread. Ammit wasn't good at separating out her different types of hunger and I'd been keeping her from sating some of her more primal needs since she'd joined my service. Her eyes were bulging with near apoplexy as her talons dug deeper and deeper into my brother's vital organs.
"Ammit, let him go." I spoke calmly, approaching her with my palm upturned in what might have appeared non-threateningly for anyone not carrying a Goa'uld foci in their palm.
"It's a vampire, Warden. Even now I can feel it trying to feed off of me, hungering for me." Ammit snarled ripping her other hand free from the remains of the Helicopter now that we were no longer falling. Her palm was shredded and glowing from where the metal shredded flesh. I could actually see a hint of bone between the preternaturally quickly healing glowing blood filling her wound. "If I let it go, it will try to kill me."
"Ammit, listen to reason…" I tried to reply to her only for the goddess to speak over me.
"No, damn it, you listen!" Ammit snarled over me, her voice reverberating with abject vitriol. "I know these things. I know them better than any living creature in the entire Galaxy. So, when I tell you something about a vampire, whelpling god, you do not argue with me. You listen. Period."
"Ammit…" I flinched at her tone.
"Don't you 'Ammit' me as though I were one of your stable of doe eyed priestesses." She tilted her head towards Muminah as the priestess extricated herself from her seatbelt, nervously clutching Kincaid's arm as gods quarreled. I felt an unaccountable jolt of possessiveness as Kincaid actually let her grasp his arm, though if it were out of some latent attraction to the priestess or my unresolved feelings for Murphy I couldn't say. She let go of the man's arm as though she'd been scalded when she realized that I'd seen her, bowing her head in shame and blushing deeply. Ammit snorted in disgust at the display. "I am a Goddess, Warden, not some chattel to be ordered around. Look at it, Warden, and tell me that it's safe to let this thing free."
As worried as I was for Thomas' physical safety, Ammit was right. The silver light of Thomas' hunger had subsumed the man's entire eyes. His entire body was a rictus of coiled muscles and sinew, throbbing with a desire that had crushed any semblance of logic within him. His psychic wammy was only directed at Ammit at the moment, but I could feel the vague tugs of it at the corners of my mind. It wasn't the controlled power I'd felt when Lara had used it in the deeps or when Thomas had tired to use it on me the library. This was something instinctual, impulsive.
I wasn't even sure if Thomas was conscious or if this was some sort of comatose takeover by the demon living in his body. "Oh… crap."
"I know that you owe this creature's mother much, but I cannot conceive of a way for one of us not to walk away from this dead." Ammit's mouth frothed with saliva, giving the distinct impression that she'd gone rabid. "Unless we allow it to feed, it will continue to be a danger to us. And I know that you would never consent to allow that. Not for a full feeding. Not for a terminal one."
"I…" Would I? For Thomas? Could I let someone die so that my brother would live? I couldn't use Kincaid, he played a role later in my life. Muminah was off the table, without question. I couldn't exactly use the Russians without having them turn against me, and I was still reasonably sure I'd need them to find Buyan. Enlil… perhaps, nobody seemed to be particularly fond of him and I could probably garner favor with the White Court by…. What the hell was I thinking?
No. I wouldn't. Not for him. Not for him, not for anyone. There were some lines that you just didn't cross. I got as far as saying the "Nuh" of "No" before Ammit realized my hesitation, her predator's instincts honed to a razor's edge. An instant of hesitation was an instant too long for her not to catch it. She clutched my brother with a bone crushing squeeze of her fist, ignoring the Vampire's howl of pain as she turned twin glowing pits of vitriol towards me. "You… You're actually considering it?"
"No… not really." I replied with insufficient fervor to convince even a toddler of my sincerity.
"The fuck warden, why is it ok when he eats people?" Ammit sounded more hurt than angry. "Who was this man's mother?"
"Margaret LeFay." I replied honestly.
"No… no, none of that. No lying with truth. No facts to hide the whole story." Ammit's other hand whipped out, quick as a snake, and grabbed my brother's head between razor sharp talons. "For once in your life you're going to give me a whole answer. Tell me why I shouldn't crush this psychophage like the millions of other vampires I've slain for being the monsters they are? Tell me why you value this creature's life above mine!" She calmed, her eye twitching disturbingly as her voice grew deadly quiet. "Tell me or I will assume the creature ensorcelled you while you were imprisoned."
Her eyes glowed again, shimmering green instead of the gold I associated with the Goa'uld. Enlil grabbed my arm firmly, hissing a warning. "Warden, take care with your words – Ammit's power was not completely taken."
"What?" I blinked in surprise, looking from Ammit to Enlil and back. "I thought you were all stripped of your powers by the Terms."
"Some more than others Warden." Enlil sighed, tugging at his beard. "If you'd been honest with us about your relative novice status within the pantheon rather than imitating Heka I would have warned you of this long before now. Ammit devoured the souls of the Unworthy. Even now she can use that connection to see sin. If you lie to her, or try to hide things from her, she will know."
That… that was very, very bad. I'd spent the better part of a year prevaricating to a woman who apparently would instantly know if someone was lying to her. But no – that couldn't be right. I'd never felt the piercing wave of insight she was bringing down upon me now. This wasn't some magic that could be done surreptitiously or pass without notice. I could feel the goddess' eyes as though they were pressed against my soul with an immediacy that effectively rendered even a token attempt at psychic defense irrelevant.
Judging by the glowing green blood running down her face like glowing tears, tapping into this power was extremely painful for Ammit. I didn't imagine she'd tolerate that pain for long before losing patience and snapping Thomas' neck. She snarled. "Why do you care about this… this thing!"
She needed honest. Simple. True. And without any attempt to conceal my intentions. Fine, she wanted a truth bomb dropped on her, I'd be glad to supply one. "If you kill him we will all die. Every single one of us."
Ammit froze, her body tensing up from the utter magnitude of my conviction in the truth of those words. "What could one single vampire do to merit that treatment?"
"Ammit, when I told the Winter Queen that I knew the future, I wasn't lying. I know the future. I have seen the chain of events in that man's future and if you kill him you will inevitably cause a doom upon us beyond even the gods to survive. You will unmake my entire Pantheon, destroying everything I have made and you along with it more than likely. I doubt you will survive." I replied, holding my staff up and letting the tip of it glow with searing heat. "And even if you do, I will live just long enough to hunt you down and kill you for the millions upon billions of lives you will take by making this short-sighted choice."
"But he's a vampire?" Ammit replied in befuddlement. "How could he possibly be that important?"
"He's a man. He's a sum of his choices, good and bad. His good choices will lead him to important things in life." I smiled, thinking of the calming smile of my friend Michael as he offered sermonic wisdom. "Nobody is beyond saving who is willing to make right choices. Yes, he's a vampire. Yes, he's guilty of murder and worse, but he's trying to be better than the monster inside him. We can't chose our past, only our future."
Enlil stiffened as though I'd run a lighting rod though him. "Ammit, let the vampire live."
"What?" Ammit blinked in confusion, as surprised as I was by the god's uncharacteristic decision to intercede on behalf of the Thomas.
"The fact that you haven't ripped the vampire's head off tells me that the Warden's babbling puddle of madness was, inexplicably, nothing but truth." Enlil groaned. "I'm not willing to risk anything he considers to be 'doom beyond the power of the gods' given the scale of events the Warden considers to be surmountable problems. We've killed plenty of vampires already, let this one go."
"Well… I… shit." Ammit's eyes returned to their normal state of luminous gold, turning to the increasingly violent feral incubus. "What am I supposed to do with this thing?"
"Do you still have your healing device?" I asked Ammit, pulling the gauntlets from my hands and pulling the helmet from my head.
"Yes." Ammit gritted her fangs as Thomas kicked her ribs hard enough to break one.
"Good, you'll need it." I turned to Enlil. "I need help with the fasteners."
"Warden, just once, could you please come up with a plan that isn't completely insane?" Enlil sighed, fiddling with the fastenings on my armor. He spent a good minute failing to accomplish his goal before swearing out a tirade of frustrated Akkadian swear words. He gave up on it, letting go with his jeweled fingers and stewing next to me as he gestured for Muminah. "Woman! Fix this."
I got a distinct kick from how effortlessly my High Priestess managed to execute the task that the god had failed to do, her deft fingers releasing my breast-plate and removing the upper part of my armor in a matter of moments. She bowed deferentially to me and said, "I live to serve your whims, Lord Warden," in a way that might as well have translated as "fuck off Enlil" based upon her calculated absence of acknowledgement of the Mesopotamian god.
No longer hindered by my armor, I approached my brother. Ammit sputtered, "Warden, this is a really – really bad idea!"
"I'm not going to let him feed from me." I brushed off her concerns. "He wouldn't be able to even if he wanted to."
"I don't know what she's saying." Kincaid interposed over our loud argument in Goa'uld, addressing me in Russian, "But you need to step back from the vampire!"
He was holding his gun up. It was not at me but not away from me, if you get my drift. He and the Russians were standing back from us, nervously observing the argument between the alien space gods. We'd not involved them directly, not yet, so none of them seemed to feel obligated to actually do anything. "Walking shirtless towards an incubus" apparently tripped Kincaid's "say something" option on the "wait and see how this turns out" scale.
"I can save him." I replied calmly. "I know how."
"Everyone who has ever gone near one of those things says that." Kincaid shook his head. "They're always wrong."
I snorted with derisive amusement, continuing to walk towards the vampire. It wasn't exactly as though his bullets could hurt me. Thomas, definitely, but not me. And I didn't think Kincaid would waste the bullet. "I'm a god, Kincaid. Let me work a miracle here, why don'tcha."
I hugged my brother from behind, holding him in a tight embrace. He howled in agony as skin met skin, his flesh bubbling and boiling where I'd wrapped my arms around him. His hunger was not prepared for the protective geas of love within me, fleeing me it involuntarily let go of Ammit and tried to pry me from him. His fingers blistered and puckered as they tried to wrest me from his body.
I didn't enjoy hurting my brother, but it was the only thing I could think of doing. White Court vampires kryptonite was love. And given that Thomas had gone full on Kneel before Zod in his application of the come hither whammy, green rocks felt like the best solution. As the last of the silver light faded from his eyes he groaned in a whimpering excuse for his normal voice, spitting up pink blood now that his hunger wasn't forcing him through the pain.
"Ammit! The healing device." I held out my hand for her to toss me the foci, wrapping it over my hand and willing the device to action. I hated the healing devices. They made me feel filthy to even touch them. They were an artefact of necromancy, plain and simple. The person using the device used the devices internal power source, along with some of their own life force, to heal the illness and injuries of their patient. Effectively the caster was killing themselves by inches in order to use it. For an Unas with a healing capacity that bordered on biological immortality or a Goa'uld System Lord who could expect to have a sarcophagus to top off their life span with a virtually unlimited pool of energy, it meant remarkably little. For any Wizard or Practitioner foolish enough to actually use these devices, healing even minor injuries could mean that they were shortening their lifespan by months or years without knowing it.
I felt the sickly sweet cold of necromancy as I fed my own life force into my brother, shimmering white light healing his wounds and even knitting together the scars I'd caused with the protection of my love. By the time I was done he was back to that infuriatingly pristine, movie-star turned model look that he seemed to have at all times. I threw the device back to Ammit so that she could heal herself, disgusted at myself for ever having even touched the device as I helped the groggy form of my brother to his feet.
"That… really hurt." Thomas spoke the words as though he were trying to chew through something thick, the device healed the body but left the muscles somewhat tense for a few minutes after it finished working. "I mean… wow. That really hurt."
"Good." I replied convivially. "You were being a jerk."
"You're a shitty fairy godmother." Thomas groaned.
"I'm not a fairy or a mother." I replied. "Just a god. Catching our interest isn't commonly known for causing joy in the lives of those we've met."
"Bright ray of sunshine, you are." Thomas squinted up, looking at Ammit as she tended to her wounds. His face colored with shame before he spoke in English. "Uh… sorry for… trying to kill you."
Ammit arched a ridged, scaly brow. "What did the vampire say?"
"I thought you spoke English?" I blinked in confusion.
"I speak it, I just wanted to make sure that that thing was actually dumb enough to think that I'll just take 'sorry' and be done with the matter." Ammit actually laughed.
I paused, unsure what the safe answer was to that.
Ammit let loose another loud belly laugh as she looked out at the horizon beyond us. "Warden, I don't know how you managed it, but you found the only creature with worse survival instincts than your own."
"At least we are back on familiar ground." Enlil sighed, looking out across the dunes. I could just make out the peaks of a series of artificial mountains in the distance. Giza and a number of other, smaller, pyramids.
"How did you get us to Egypt?" The Russian Colonel asked, pulling out a small device from his waist as he asked the question. I presumed that it had at once been one of the GPS devices I kept hearing about, partly out of context and partly because the device had ceased to operate utterly after having been exposed to that much magic. He pulled out three different cellular devices in succession after that, trying each of them only to put them away in disappointment. Electronics and magic just didn't mix.
"Through the Nevernever." I replied. "I thought that was obvious."
"I understand that much, but what is the Nevernever? Why was it a forest in one place and jagged rocks in the next? Why does it apparently destroy all electronics?" He tapped his watch disappointedly. "I do not regret it saving our lives, but if I am going to have to document this in my post mission report I will need more than 'we went through a magic portal to Egypt.' Moscow will not react well to that."
"But they were willing to contract you out to vampire hunters?" I replied, pointing to Kincaid. "With a foreign Merc and a preschooler as your commanding officers?"
The man's expression darkened, his lip twitching as though he wanted to speak but didn't dare. One of the other Russian Soldiers, a sturdy looking man with an ugly moustache was substantially less guarded in his response. "When the President gives you direct orders, you accept them."
"Marchenko!" The Colonel hissed in irritation. "Stay your tongue."
The mustachioed Russian seemed unphased by this superior officer's frustrations, confident – or perhaps overconfident – in his situation. "Sir, the mission has gone eight ways to hell. We have clearly been incorrectly briefed to the dangers and individual players in this situation. We actually used a nuclear countermeasure. I think perhaps we've hit the point where we need to admit we are over our heads. The only reason we aren't shadows against a brick wall is that the pale one can rip holes in reality. Let the Americans fight the Goa'uld out of blind obligation, I want to know what the hell is going on! And I cannot cure that ignorance while we are pretending to be in control of this situation."
"You are treading dangerously close to insubordination, Lieutenant." The Colonel barked in reply. "I gave you an order. Drop it."
"Sir – this is madness." Marchenko continued, "We have failed our mission. It was scrapped by the kidnapped child. At best we are going to bring something of equal value, and still at the cost of hundreds of Russian lives. We will get our people back, but you are acting irrationally. Either act in accordance with how you ought to or Kirensky and I will support Vallarin's choice to relieve you of command."
Vallarin, the young man who'd re-attached my head, looked more alarmed by the prospect of undercutting the colonel than he had been as my half-decapitated head flopped round on his lap. He swallowed nervously, "Sir… please see reason."
"You all feel this way?" The Colonel looked like he wanted to shoot them as they nodded. He gritted his teeth, then seemed to deflate. He looked much older, weathered by time and stress. I recognized that look. I'd worn it more times than I cared to admit.
That was the face of a beaten man. He'd used everything in his power to force the world to be right, and it still hadn't been enough. It wasn't his fault that he'd been selected by the Archive as a pawn in whatever game she was playing with the help of the White Council. The man had received orders, and he'd followed them to the best of his ability. He knew more about the supernatural than most, but he was still just a vanilla mortal.
"How did we come to this?" He asked, soft enough that I just barely caught it.
He was punching way out of his weight class. Doing a damn good job of it, but he was out of his league and he knew it. I whistled softly, "Remind me never to play poker against that guy."
"I know." Thomas replied, standing shakily on his own two legs. "I bought the tough guy act as well."
"The pilots are dead, Warden." Ammit spoke from where she'd pried open the cockpit, her nose crinkling in disgust. "Poison?"
"Cyanide." Kincaid interjected calmly, to the overpowering odor of bitter almonds coming from the crew compartment.
"We gave the pills to our people in the event the failsafe were enacted." Replied the colonel.
"Is that actually better than getting nuked?" I inquired, trying to figure out which would be worse.
"It is more a matter of resisting the urge to disable the bomb." The Colonel shrugged, turning to me in mild contrition, watching as Muminah helped me back into my armor. "Warden… I need to know things. My ignorance will get my people killed."
"Ok, Colonel." I replied in my most Wizardly tone. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything."