Authors: John Booth

Jake's Women (Wizards) (23 page)

I hopped into my bedroom at home and ran down the stairs to see Mam and Dad. They’d left a message on my mobile phone, but I’d been off Earth for a few days and hadn’t seen it. I could have hopped straight to the living room, but there was always a chance they were entertaining visitors.

“Just got your message.”

Mam smiled at me while Dad looked at his watch.

“Just in time, son. Your Aunt May should be here any time now.”

That was unexpected to say the least.

“Why is she coming here? I could have hopped to Cardiff if I’d known she wanted to see me.”

Dad shook his head while Mam continued to smile.

“She doesn’t have to come to visit, but she hasn’t visited us here for years. She is my sister you know.”

“And the reason she wants to see me?”

Sometimes getting answers out of my parents was like getting blood from a stone. Though to be fair, I found the latter quite easy.

“She said she had a message from Dafydd.”

“To her or to me?” I had a bad case of premonition stomach, if you know what I mean.

“Why, to her of course,” my Mam said and laughed. “He hardly knows you.”

Dad looked as though he was going to argue with Mam and then decided against it.

“We’ll find out soon enough. Your Mam’s made quite a spread.”

Judging by the scones, cakes and other edibles on the coffee table, Dad wasn’t exaggerating.

“How’s Bronwyn?” Dad asked as I sat on the sofa and reached for a scone. Mam makes brilliant ones. There are more kinds of magic than the purely magical ones.

“I think she’ll be better when she gets back to school.”

“She’s missed so much work and they can’t put her back yet another year. How will she catch up?” Mam asked.

“She’ll be going back at the proper year for her age. Wizards can absorb knowledge from an appropriate expert, and in this particular case I know most of her school work. So she’ll get it from me.”

Mam looked dubious, “You were never very academic, Jake.”

She had a point, but that schoolwork made a lot more sense to me now than it did at the time I took it.

“She’ll be fine, Mam. Trust me.”

“And emotionally?” Dad continued.

“She’s a wreck. I think that she was in a better state when she was manipulating the Cult and scheming to get rid of the ringleaders. It kept her busy. Esmeralda tells me she’ll make a brilliant ruler and that all the guilt she’s going through will make her even better. But there are so many bad memories for her in Salice. Even the food shortage was down to her burning the crops. That’s why I told her to go home.”

“How can she forget how many people’s she’s killed?” Mam asked.

That was a good question that often kept me awake at night, though not on Bronwyn’s part. The truth was; I blocked it out. I hoped Bronwyn would learn to do the same. People who attacked wizards often ended up dead. It was the way things were.

“Leave it, Mandy,” Dad suggested to my immense relief. “When do you move into your new house, son?”

“That’s still a week away, but we have signed all the relevant documents.”

“Do you want your Mam and me to help?”

I smiled at that. When it came to lifting and installing heavy objects I had no trouble at all.

“No Dad, I think we’ll manage. We might need a babysitter though.”

“Merlin is so sweet and such a well behaved baby,” Mam said, smiling again.

“Do you think he’s too young for a train set?” Dad asked.

He joined in our laughter after a few seconds. Dad was a good sport.

“You seem to be enjoying a lull after the storm,” Dad said.

It was true. No one had tried to kill me in over a week. It was almost like a holiday. Fluffy was out roaming the multiverse now he could see it again. I suppose nearly losing something makes you value it all the more, so he was off sightseeing.

Merlin and Morgana had not shown any more talents for spectacular magic after healing Fluffy; for which I and their mothers were truly grateful. The house purchase had progressed and Betty hadn’t come a calling. I took that as a good sign since whenever she came to visit bad things were inevitably round the corner. Beside which, I didn’t want Betty near my wives in case it gave them any idea of what the two of us were up to. Somehow I had changed from an honest Welsh boy to a bit of a cad. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt like the right thing to do, despite the occasional twinge of guilt.

So all in all, life was good.

The doorbell rang and that feeling in my stomach came back. Mam was already at the living room door, so I hopped in front of her in the hall.

“I’ll get it, Mam. You go back to the living room.”

Mam looked at me glass-eyed and turned back. I had just put a compulsion on my mother. What was I thinking? The doorbell rang again and my stomach pulsed in time with it. By the time I opened the door, I was ready for anything.

Auntie May was a bit of a disappointment. I’d been expecting the Diabli or maybe the Knights of Justice, though why they would ring the doorbell was beyond me. I was expecting the enemy and it wasn’t her.

When I first glanced at her, Auntie May had looked her normal self and she started to smile. A second later that smile had gone, to be replaced with the exact same look I’d seen on my mother’s face just moments before.

“This is your fault, Jake Morrissey. You take all the blame. You are the guilty…”

I slammed a shield across the doorway, between the house and Auntie May. The blast that followed a millisecond later flung me back down the hall and into the full length mirror. It smashed around me, sending a thousand shards of glass into the air.

My ears rang and echoed with the blast. To my surprise, I saw that the shield I’d flung up had held. A film of blood and guts covered the doorway, blocking the light from outside. It had been the secondary blast wave, caused by the shield bowing in that had flung me all the way down the hall. Which meant the blast itself must have been enormous.

Putting a force bubble around my body I dropped the shield. Bits of what had once been a human being fell at the threshold. I saw an ear wearing an earring I recognized. Auntie May had been blown to pieces.

My hearing started to come back as I made my way to the door. I heard screams; women and children screaming, people in agony.

Broken glass from the upstairs windows fell in front of me when I got to the door. The blast had spread outwards from Auntie May in all directions not protected by my shield. The low wall with the privet hedge that guarded our front garden was completely gone, bricks and all. Lampposts were down not to mention telephone poles.

A van that had been on the other side of the road was lodged in the roof of the house across the street. Most of that house’s front wall had been knocked in and as I watched, the house fell down.

The other houses across the road were in better shape, but there wasn’t a window with intact glass as far as the eye could see. I stepped out of our house cautiously and looked back. My parent’s house house wasn’t undamaged. Every window was out, but unlike the two houses on either side of us, the walls were still standing.

I hadn’t realized I was acting stunned until I suddenly thought about my parents. I ran back into the house to find them stumbling around the living room. They looked unhurt.

“Go and help the people out there, Jake,” Mam said. “We’re fine.”

I hopped to the middle of the road and looked around. It was difficult to know where to start. I chose one of the houses where the walls had collapsed and dashed inside the first one. There was carnage everywhere I looked.

The next half hour was a blur to me. I established a rhythm to my actions. As soon I found someone, I stabilized their injuries and moved them out to the road, using mattresses from the houses for them to lie on. There were bits of people in the closest houses, but it was remarkable how many had survived.

I worked at a fever pitch pace. Find, stabilize, relocate, repeat. Police and ambulance sirens were getting closer and I needed to be finished before they arrived.

Then there was no one obvious left. I prowled through the wreckage using my magical sight to scan for life. It was difficult. I’d never used my gifts quite like this before.

I stood on the front wall of the house across the street and listened. I knew this neighbor had two young children and while the remains of the mother lay scattered across what was left of the living room there was no sign of the children. They should be here somewhere.

There were shouts from the road. Police I suspected. Probably wondering how all the injured had ended up on mattresses. I shut those sounds out of my mind and concentrated on the task in hand.

Small cries, sobs coming from under the wall. It didn’t seem likely as it was flat against the floor of the room. I scanned the area again. The wooden floor had given way and the two kids were trapped in the gap that had created. Astonishingly, they were still alive, though the wall was slowly crushing the life from them.

I lifted the wall off them and threw it into the garden. That started a new set of shouts from outside. Putting my hands on the children’s chests I send my magic down into them, repairing blood vessels, rebuilding cells and mending bone. Then I picked up them up and carried them out of the house and over to the road.

Two paramedics took the children from me. I saw Mam and Dad carrying blankets.

A man grabbed me and shook me violently.

“Was there a bomb? What happened?”

He was wearing a flak jacket, so I knew he must be part of some anti-terrorist unit.

“I don’t know. There was a gigantic blast. I came out to help.”

I didn’t think telling him that my Auntie May had exploded would help either him or me.

The paramedics wanted to bundle us into an ambulance, but we refused to go until after the seriously injured were taken away. There was some mumbling from the paramedics about how it was a miracle that so few were dead or seriously injured.

The miracle thanked them silently; well aware these people had only been injured because of me.

A familiar face spotted me and made his way through the emergency workers to stand in front of me. Inspector Thomas looked at the blood stained mattresses in the middle of the road and back at me.

“Your work?”

I nodded.

“What happened?”

“Auntie May exploded at the door.”

“The bomber.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded again.

“I won’t have my town turned into a war zone.”

“Neither will I.”

He held out his hand and I shook it. One way or another, this was going to end and end soon.