Spells Trouble, Kristin Cast [books to read in a lifetime .TXT] 📗

sulfur billowed with the rain-touched breeze. It burned her throat, but Mercy ignored it and joined Hunter at the stang.

Reverently, Hunter took the bottle and Mercy placed her hands on the forked ends of the stang just below the sacred mistletoe, and focused on being a channel for healing energy to flow through her body and into the earth all the way down to the roots of the ancient palms. Her hands warmed and a soft, moss-colored light illuminated the newly cut oak bough. Excitement fluttered through Mercy—it was working!

“Protect and heal … heal and protect … protect and heal … heal and protect,” Mercy invoked while Hunter began her circle around the trees, spraying the potion onto its gray bark and browned leaves while she spoke her own invocation in a voice filled with power and confidence.

“I call on the Powers of Moon and Stars—of Sky and Earth. By tree and bough, leaf and shoot, with all my heart and the workings of this modern world we love so well, I bless this palm with strength and healing—growth and health—life and love.”

Hunter rejoined Mercy at the stang and placed the empty bottle at their feet. Then Mercy pulled the staff from the ground. Holding it in her right hand she grasped Hunter’s hand in her left and together they strode to the tree until they stood within touching distance of it. The rain had slowed to mist. The sulfuric smell was still there, but fainter. It had been diluted by the sweetness of herbs and citrus—and the sharp scent of modern magic.

Mercy lifted the stang.

“I honor you, earth’s child. I honor your growth—your boughs and leaves and thick, mighty trunk. I thank you for your protection and your energy and your spirit—may whatever ails you be gone, and never return. And may you thrive always. Blessed be!”

“Blessed be!” Hunter shouted joyfully.

The green glow intensified, and with magically enhanced power, Mercy drove the stang into the ground at the base of the tree.

There was a terrible sound like the ripping of a curtain, and all five trunks began to shiver. The ground quaked under their feet, causing the girls to stagger backward. And then the air quivered, and a veil that had until then been invisible, lifted from the center of the clump of trees to reveal a figure. His back was to them, but he whirled around, raising a spear, ready to throw.

“Foul demons! Vile monsters!” The creature lifted a shield and took a wide stance. The air before him rippled and glistened as if he were inside a fishbowl looking out, but that semipermeable barrier didn’t make him appear less menacing as the power he exuded blasted at them. Then, like a bizarre version of Gandalf the Grey, he shouted, “You shall not pass!”

Together Mercy and Hunter lurched back another step, clinging to each other’s hand like they needed an anchor to reality—which they definitely did because the creature in front of them defied any sense of the real that they had ever known.

His body appeared human and male. He was powerfully built. The short, woven leather skirt he wore wrapped low around his waist, and the golden protective plates that adorned his shins and forearms left most of that body exposed. He looked like a bronze statue—except for his head and neck, which were terrifying. He glared at them from behind the veil that separated his world and theirs and though the barrier between them caused his image to come in and out of focus, almost like it was pixilated, his raised spear and shield were a palpable threat.

“Tyr! What in all the hells is that?” Hunter pressed closer to Mercy.

“I don’t bloody know, but I’m not going to let it get us!” Mercy closed the few feet between them and her bag that rested on the wet ground beside her sister’s basket. Never taking her eyes from the creature, she frantically felt around inside her purse until her hand closed on the pepper-spray gun she always carried with her. Mercy broke the trigger seal. She held it in a two-handed grip in front of her, just like she’d seen Mariska Hargitay do a million times on SVU. She swallowed back the bile of her fear and began walking toward the creature that stood in the center of the glistening trees.

“Stay back! This is our world! You do not belong here!” Mercy’s voice was fierce with the adrenaline that surged through her body.

Then Hunter was there beside her, so close their shoulders pressed together. Her sister was holding part of a fallen tree branch over her head, like a club.

“We guard this gate! And we are not going to let you come into our world!” Hunter sounded powerful and confident and Mercy felt a rush of pride in her sister.

The creature tilted its monstrous head. His image wavered as he appeared to study the girls with large, almond-shaped eyes that were the color of fertile earth. They were the only things in that unbelievable face recognizably human. The rest of it was definitely reptilian—like a crocodile and a dragon had been mixed together. Small, onyx scales glistened smoothly up a long, sinuous, hooded neck to a crest of crimson horns that sprouted from his head down his back. His mouth was a muzzle lined with rows of dangerous fangs that he had suddenly stopped baring at them.

“You—you are Gatekeepers?” His voice was bizarrely human—deep and masculine—and even though the barrier between worlds made their view of him go in and out of focus, his words came to them clear and strong.

Mercy kept the pepper-spray gun pointed at him. “We are. Who are you?”

The creature put the spear down, so that its flattened edge rested by his feet, which Mercy noted, were dressed in golden sandals. “I am Khenti Amenti, son of the immortal warrior Upuaut, Gate Guardian of the Realm of Osiris. And you?”

Mercy lowered the pepper-spray gun, sent a silent prayer to her goddess, please give me the right