Crashing Paradise Read online

  “I admit I am surprised to see you, beast,” Conan Doyle said calmly. The mage tapped the tobacco from his pipe on the side of the building, returning it to safety inside his jacket. He then moved toward the cowering Scissor-man. “If I remember correctly, you were banished to a pocket dimension, with no chance of escape, never to bother anyone, or anything, ever again—at least that is what I believed.”

  The mage extended his arm farther, dispelling the pool of shadow the bogey used to travel in a stinking, oily cloud. The Scissor-man attempted to pull the tails of its stained coat over the exposed areas of its foul flesh to protect it from the burning glare of his magic.

  “So how is it that you confront me here and now?”

  Conan Doyle was perplexed at the appearance of this creature, beginning to wonder if the Scissor-man had somehow responded to the invitation for conference. But that’s absurd, he thought. A creature such as the one cowering beneath him had no concept of anything other than its own perverse needs.

  But, then, why is it here? And how has it managed to escape from the prison I made for it?

  He didn’t have time for this. His frustration flared, and he touched a burning finger to the bald head of the cowering Scissor-man.

  “Tell me,” he demanded.

  The foul beast’s body began to tremble with what Conan Doyle at first thought was a mixture of fear and pain. Then he realized that wasn’t the case at all—the Scissor-man was laughing, turning its face and body into the searing light thrown by Conan Doyle’s hand, with no adverse effect.

  No effect at all.

  “Snip! Snip! Snip!” the creature screeched, lunging toward his outstretched hand, the bloodstained shears opened like the beak of some predatory bird.

  The scissors closed, severing Conan Doyle’s index finger.

  It fell to the street, blood dripping down between the stones.

  “They go so fast,” the Scissor-man hissed, snatching up Conan Doyle’s finger and shoving it into its exposed rib cage for the crow to greedily consume.

  Clutching the injured hand to his chest, the mage bellowed his fury. A wave of magic exploded from the fingertips of his uninjured hand, engulfing the bogey and hurling him, screaming, against wall of the flower shop.

  “Damn you!” Conan Doyle roared, raising his bloody hand to his face, staring at the bleeding stump of his finger in shock. How is this possible? his mind raced. Has my brain become so obsessed with the Demogorgon that even this childhood bogeyman can get the better of me?

  He had expected to see the burning body of the Redlegged Scissor-man stretched out upon the cobblestones, but it was not to be. The beast still stood, looking down at its bloodstained legs, nearly as surprised as Conan Doyle.

  “Seems that either my benefactors have refashioned me of sterner stuff,” the nightmare-stalker said with a growing smile of jagged, jack-o’-lantern teeth, “or the passing years have made you far weaker.”

  Despite the blinding ache in his hand, Conan Doyle set his jaw against the pain and began to summon a spell that would show the beastie just how “weak” he was, when he heard footfalls approaching. He cursed beneath his breath. As if he didn’t have enough to concern himself with at the moment, now he had to worry about some unknowing pedestrian blundering into the midst of their battle.

  “Stay back,” he cried, and the lone figure hobbling down the street came to an abrupt stop.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” an all-too-familiar voice responded. The twisted form of Nigel Gull slowly emerged from the shadows.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Conan Doyle stared at him warily. “I should have known you’d have something to do with this.”

  But then the Scissor-man was on the move, bloody shears raised to strike.

  “Arthur, what’s going on?” Gull asked, putting on an air of surprise.

  “Spare me, Nigel,” Conan Doyle said.

  With a twist of his fingers and a flick of his wrist, he sent forth arcs of cracking, blue magic that skewered the advancing bogey—but again, did not destroy it. The Scissor-man shrieked, wisps of oily black smoke trailing from the empty caverns of its eye sockets as the maggots writhing within them began to burn.

  “I don’t understand, Arthur,” Gull said, his twisted frame stepping closer. He cocked his head and studied the melee unfolding on the street, the blood and magic spattering ancient stones. “Have I done something to offend?”

  Conan Doyle ignored him a moment, though his nostrils flared with anger. He had to focus on the Scissor-man. The mage reached deep within himself and drew upon the magic that churned at the core of his being, increasing the deadly power of the spells he cast at the Scissor-man. Its body twisted, wracked with pain and sorcery, but still it did not fall. There was no way that this beast should have been able to withstand a casting of this magnitude, and it made Conan Doyle seethe.

  “Your very presence offends, Nigel,” the archmage said, not even bothering to hide his anger and disgust from the disfigured sorcerer. “I was willing to look past all that—past our history—to come together in the spirit of unity to defeat a common foe, but I guess I was foolish to think you were capable of such camaraderie.”

  The Scissor-man let out an unearthly howl, attempting to use the blades of its shears to deflect the arcs of humming, preternatural force that skewered its body.

  The scissors closed upon the bolts of magical force, causing an explosion that repelled both Conan Doyle and the bloodstained bogey, the crow cawing and fluttering about inside its rib cage.

  Spots of color danced before the mage’s eyes as he picked himself up from the street to face his attacker again.

  “I haven’t a clue what you’re going on about,” Gull said indignantly, even closer now, and Conan Doyle fought the urge to begin an attack against him as well. As long as Gull did not assault him directly, he would not open up a second front to this battle.

  “Are you suggesting that I have something to do with . . .”

  Gull looked toward the Scissor-man, who was now in the process of picking up hundreds of thumbs that littered the street. In the ruckus with Conan Doyle, its necklace had broken.

  “Are those thumbs?” Gull asked.

  “You bloody well know what they are,” Conan Doyle spat, clutching his injured hand to his chest.

  Gull was silent as Conan Doyle advanced toward the first of his foes. The Scissor-man was beside himself, muttering names—the previous owners of the liberated digits, Conan Doyle guessed—as it attempted to pick them all up.

  “James, Carolyn, Bartholomew, Richard, sweet little Betsy,” the Scissor-man whined, holding his treasures against its chest.

  Conan Doyle hovered over the bogey, the power of the magic he now mustered radiating from his body, stirring the very elements around him. His silver hair moved atop his head as if disturbed by a strong wind.

  “I’ve had just about enough of this, monster,” the archmage proclaimed in a thunderous voice.

  A blast of green fire knocked the collected thumbs from the Scissor-man’s hands.

  “You will tell me how you came to be free,” Conan Doyle said, his patience at its lowest ebb. “And then you will tell me of the benefactors you spoke of—who they are, and why they would use you to do me harm.”

  Infuriated by this indignity, the Scissor-man sprang up, its large shears ready yet again to sample Conan Doyle’s flesh, but the mage was ready, or at least he believed he was.

  The Scissor-man struck the barrier of magic that surrounded the mage and became stuck like a fly within a spider’s web. The creature thrashed wildly, its body attacked by the magic Conan Doyle had conjured to protect himself. It cried out in pain and frustration, its frantic movements only making its agony all the more pronounced.

  “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll make it stop,” Conan Doyle said calmly. “Who is responsible for this attack?”

  The Scissor-man began to laugh horribly. “They know you oh so well,” the monster c
hortled, its voice trembling in pain. “But you have not a clue as to who they are.”

  “Tell me!” the mage demanded, increasing the level of power within the protective aura, inflicting even more hurt upon the captured bogey.

  The Scissor-man screamed. “They spoke to me from the shadows of my captivity.” The nightmare-beast thrashed in the grip of the power that trapped it. “Promising that I could hurt you . . . that I could see your pain.”

  “Who? Are? They?” Conan Doyle growled through gritted teeth.

  “Angels of mercy, they were,” the Scissor-man replied.

  It shifted its position and thrust its thirsty shears—suddenly unhindered by the power of the mage’s conjuration—toward the soft flesh of his throat.

  This is not possible.

  Before the archmage could react, there came a sudden arc of blistering magic that tore the Scissor-man from Conan Doyle’s web.

  “No!” the Scissor-man shrieked, struggling to be free of this new sorcery.

  Conan Doyle spun to find Gull standing there, manipulating the forces that now held the monster aloft.

  “You actually believe I would ally myself with this?” the deformed mage asked, the hint of annoyance in his voice.

  The Scissor-man’s shears began to work on Gull’s magic, cutting it away. Conan Doyle said nothing as Gull raised a gnarled hand and sketched at the air as ancient words, dripping with power, left his distorted mouth.

  The Scissor-man barely had time to scream as its body was suddenly assaulted from all sides. Its limbs were broken before Gull’s magic wrenched them from their sockets. The savagery intensified, the nightmare bogey torn into pieces that momentarily hovered in the air before dropping wetly to the stone street.

  “You don’t know me as well as you think you do,” Gull sneered. He wiped his still-sparking hands on the front of his dark suit, turned on his heel, and limped off into the darkness.

  The threat averted for now, Conan Doyle breathed in the cool night air and attempted to isolate the pain of his hand.

  He walked toward the haphazardly discarded remains of his attacker, eyes scanning each and every bloody piece. The bogey had already started to decay, its rotting flesh beginning to smoke, smolder, and stink.

  Conan Doyle was looking for the bird—the body of the crow that had flapped its wings wildly within the cage of the Scissor-man’s ribs.

  He needed to retrieve his finger.

  2

  THE Equinox Festival organizers had set up on a vast, open sprawl of scrub brush, skeletal trees, and red clay earth a few miles outside Sedona, Arizona. To the east and north were ragged cliffs of layered rock, red-orange at the bottom and white at the top. In the early afternoon, the sun shone on those cliffs, and the colors were so vivid that they seemed almost unreal, as though they came from some otherworldly place.

  To Katie Matthews, their beauty was half the reason to hold the Spring Equinox Festival here. The landscape had a rugged beauty, unlike the lushness she knew characterized so much of Faerie, but it was that surrealness that made the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness outside Sedona the perfect place for the fest.

  There’s magic here.

  Even hardened skeptics who came to visit this place went away with their cynicism challenged, quieted. Katie made the trip once a year, leaving her bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the hands of two friends who’d been working for her part-time since she had first opened the store. The Equinox Festival filled her with such a sense of peace and wonder and magic that it restored her spirit for another year.

  Yet it was more than a simple pilgrimage. It was also the one time every year that the Daughters of Ceridwen gathered.

  Katie had followed the folktales of Ceridwen for almost twenty years—since even before she had opened the bookstore—but it had only been when she’d joined the rest of the world on the Internet that she’d discovered others also were fascinated by the stories of the Princess of the Fey, an elemental sorceress who had fought in the Twilight Wars and saved many worlds from darkness. Most people—even the modern pagans and other believers in Faerie—paid little attention to recent folktales about the Fey.

  As if something has to be old to be true, Katie thought, smiling at the narrow-mindedness of the idea. But there were women in the Daughters of Ceridwen—a group that had come together because of the Net—who had claimed to have met Ceridwen themselves, even some who claimed to have set foot in Faerie.

  Katie’s heart fluttered at the thought of visiting that fabled land, but it had not happened yet. However, she did share a secret with the other members of the group . . . Ceridwen was no folktale. Katie had met her, had seen her magic firsthand, had been astonished by her beauty. The sorceress seemed to dance on the air, even when she walked, and her eyes were a shade of purple unlike anything seen in the human world.

  So even here, at the Equinox Festival, among the wiccans and pagans and neo-druids, the Daughters of Ceridwen had their own magic—their own truth. They joined in the singing and the creation of art. Some of them went topless or nude and danced around evening bonfires there under the moon in the shadows of the red rocks, calling out to goddesses of fertility and nature and rebirth.

  But much of their time was spent gathering together, apart from the several thousand others who had come for the festival.

  The Daughters of Ceridwen had their own prayers and rituals. There were nearly one hundred of them, and they had come from all over the world—teenagers and housewives, writers and ecology crusaders and artists and musicians, but also a handful of professional types, doctors and lawyers and a biologist from Geneva. Once a day, during the festival, they gathered to drink wine and laugh together and focus their positive energies on the elements and on spiritual support for Ceridwen and all her works.

  Together, they practiced magic. It was small magic, certainly, creating a bit of elemental fire or a breeze where none had been. Several of the women, including an eighteen-year-old British girl called Seraph and Katie herself, could do somewhat more—they could sculpt things from the dirt and rock. Seraph had created a figure and made it move. Katie was better with fire.

  Ceridwen herself had taught them these small magics. In the past year they had seen her more and more. She had entered the world, leaving Faerie behind for now. From time to time she spoke to them. They would see her face in the bark of a tree or the surface of a pond or the crackling fire in the hearth, and she would talk to them.

  Katie was grateful for the other Daughters of Ceridwen. If not for them, she might have thought she was insane. Even the day when Ceridwen had come into her bookstore, traveling between Faerie and Earth through the pages of a book, had seemed afterward too much like the richest, most vivid of dreams to be real.

  But it had been real, and she cherished it.

  Now she sat outside the camper she shared with Arielle Pardue, a twenty-six-year-old woman from Phoenix. Katie had flown out to meet Ari, and the two had traveled north in Ari’s camper. It was hot as hell inside, even with the windows open, but this time of year there was no reason to be inside the huge beast of a vehicle. The sun was warm, but the air was sweet and pleasantly warm and the breeze gentle. The camper had a canopy that unrolled from one side, and it was open now.

  Katie sat in the shade of the camper with her journal open on her lap, recording the beauty of the gathering around her.

  She could see an older couple walking hand in hand, and a young, Asian woman painting a goddess portrait in blues and oranges, even as two men nearby were busy painting one another.

  From somewhere not far away, she smelled something delicious cooking. Guitar and flute music filled the air, and though she could not understand the words, she heard voices raised in song.

  The journal felt good in her hands. It had been handmade by Guin Schiffman, another of the Daughters of Ceridwen.

  Guin was from Orcas Island, in Washington state. She cured and stretched the leather herself, and even made the leather strap th
at held it closed and hammered out the brass button the strap attached to.

  She was also the most psychically sensitive woman in the group. Guin had never met Ceridwen in person, but the elemental had been in contact with her through ice and flame and wood more than any other of her human followers. It was Katie’s theory that Guin had more than a little Fey blood in her family.

  Maybe they all did.

  A smile touched her lips as she wrote this in her journal, going further with her speculation that perhaps that was why they had been so drawn to Ceridwen, and she had attempted to help them learn a bit of elemental magic.

  A pleasant spark lit in her heart. Katie loved the idea that there could be a bit of the Fey in her.

  Someone called her name. She looked up from her journal to see Ari hurrying toward her, past a big tent that had been put together with bamboo posts and silk sheets of elegant colors, like something out of Arabian Nights. A trio of twentysomething wiccan women called out to Ari as she went by, and she gave a quick wave and hurried on.

  A ripple of concern went through Katie. Ari nearly always had a smile on her pretty face—sometimes a happy, ready-todance kind of smile, and sometimes a sleepy, musing sort of smile—but at the moment she looked very serious.

  Katie tied the leather strap over the brass button on her journal and stood up.

  “Ari, what is it? Is something wrong?”

  The younger woman did not slow down. She took Katie by the wrist and led her up the steps into the camper. Ari slipped the journal and pen from Katie’s hands and set them on a table.

  “What?” Katie demanded. “You’re scaring me.”

  Ari tucked her blond hair behind her pixie ears, her blue eyes sparkling, and a kind of mad grin split her face. Her hands shook.

  “Guin sent me to get you and spread the word,” Ari said, practically giddy. “Everyone’s supposed to gather on the top of the hill in half an hour. Oh, goddess, Katie . . . She’s coming here to talk to us. Ceridwen’s coming!”

  THE air swirled around Ceridwen, caressing her with a gentle lover’s touch. She clutched her rowan staff in her right hand and closed her eyes, letting the wind carry her forward.