Page 29 of Outside the Veil (Endangered Fae #1)

With hurricane force, the wendigo manifested in an icy blast, both physical and psychic. Its size and shape remained elusive, though a shimmer on the wind showed where it passed. Finn struggled to keep aloft, cursing as he flung up a barrier to shield Diego.

“No, querido , don’t let it distract you.” Diego nudged the barrier back down . “Concentrate on attacking. I won’t lose you.”

“Best not, bucko,” Finn growled. “And take your own advice.”

A two-story wall of water rose from the nearby stream and slammed into the wendigo’s shimmer. It only wavered for a moment before it renewed its onslaught.

“Your spirit guide is nothing, Shaman. Powerless. Come to me. Feel true power.”

The fierce winds tumbled Finn from the sky. He landed awkwardly on the rocks, one wing pinned beneath him. “Blasted, cursed, evil bag of wind,” he muttered as he struggled to rise. “Diego, do you have it? I could use some help. Just a mite.”

“Almost, almost… Are you all right?” He tried his best to concentrate on gathering the lightning, but Finn’s pain was terrible. The wing or the leg or both had most likely snapped.

“Destroy that wretched thing and I will be.”

The ball of lightning gathered on his palm and grew from an orange lick of flame to blue to a white-hot maelstrom of crackling plasma.

He felt as much as saw the wendigo bearing down on Finn, and he hurled his lightning into the center of the tempest. The winds shrieked, the monster’s progress halted.

Then, to Diego’s horror, it turned and fled, not into the wilderness but toward town.

“Never fear, my hero. It shan’t get far.” Finn rid himself of the broken wing and reformed as a Rottweiler-sized black falcon. He arrowed through the gathering dusk, gaining swiftly on the wendigo, whose passage wavered and meandered as if it were dizzy.

The lights of a house shone through the trees. A small child played in the patch of grass by the back door.

“No! Finn, get in front of it!”

With a tremendous burst of speed, Finn swooped in to cut the wendigo off from the house. It shrieked its frustration and took physical form, perhaps hoping to reach the child on the ground. On all fours, it loped toward the toddler, who sat frozen and helpless in horror.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic…” Grim determination overrode terror. Diego pulled the lightning to him in a vertiginous rush, only half-aware, he formed a spear instead of a ball. “ Wendigo! Leave the child alone!”

The cadaverous, mottled face lifted to him, mouth stretched in a manic leer. He hurled his spear directly at its heart. The lightning struck true, the spear shattered against its heart of ice, and the wendigo turned to stagger back into the trees.

Now the toddler recalled how to move and dashed into the house, screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, there’s a monster outside and an angel fighting him!”

Diego heard the mother reply in a distracted fashion as she closed the door, “That’s nice, hon.”

Once again Finn shifted, this time to a black bear to match the speed of the wendigo through the forest. “Damn you, coward! Turn and fight!” he roared, as they crashed through a bramble-heavy thicket.

The wendigo stumbled on, wounded, unable to return to its most powerful, incorporeal form.

Its thoughts had gone silent though, so Diego did not discount the possibility of a ruse to draw Finn into a trap.

The thicket became so dense they could no longer see their quarry, though the snapping, rustling sounds asserted he still ran ahead.

“Watch yourself, mi vida , it’s not done yet.”

“I know that, love. Don’t you think I—”

The sudden crash of brush on Finn’s right cut him off.

A heavy body hit his side and slammed him to the ground.

He cried out as claws like scythes raked deep into his flesh.

Sharp teeth flashed. Bear-Finn got hold of the wendigo’s throat.

In a hideous show of strength, the wendigo took hold of Finn’s jaws and pulled them apart, until the bottom one broke with a sickening snap.

It lifted Finn over its head and hurled him against an ancient pine.

He landed in an unnaturally twisted heap, his back broken.

“Finn! Dios … Finn!”

“I’m still here, my hero. Please forgive me. I can’t—”

“Shh, shh, I’ll finish it. I have to. Finn… I love you.”

“Diego? What are you going to do?”

With a soft caress over Finn’s mind, Diego shut himself off from his love, though his heart broke to hear Finn’s anguish. He turned to the wendigo, which stood waiting, as if it knew this moment had always been inevitable.

“I have defeated your spirit guide three times, Shaman. You are too powerful to depend on such a weak being. It is time. Join with me.”

Diego had no intention of giving in yet.

His lightning had hurt the monster, but not destroyed it.

He needed a larger missile, a more massive gathering of magic than he had attempted before.

He pulled the lightning to him once more, forming a ball as large as a mine shell. Not enough, it’s not enough.

In desperation, he cast out farther, reaching for something more to help him, and was shocked to find tendrils of magic connecting him to the trees, the rocks, the tiny lichen at his feet.

Not bridges or paths, but an incredible shining web of connections.

Exhilarated and frightened by so much power, he opened himself to the flows, let the energy flood through him.

“Shaman, you cannot destroy me this way. Wound me, banish me for a time, but I will live on.”

He ignored the wendigo’s taunts and kept at it. The ball expanded to the size of a small tank. When he prepared to hurl it, though, he had another hard shock.

The web connected him to the wendigo. This horrific, destructive creature was part of the magic as well, part of the fabric, the whole. The cold void inside it howled with ravenous hunger and desperate longing, but its connections to the world around it shone no less brightly than Diego’s.

He lowered his arms and let the lightning scatter.

“You see now. We must be one, Shaman.” The wendigo opened its arms in a dreadful parody of a lover’s welcome. “Come to me.”

“The void must be filled,” Tia Carmen had said. The terrible hunger had to be satisfied. It occurred to him suddenly that the stories of pouring hot wax down a wendigo’s throat were a metaphor for something else.

Diego moved into the wendigo’s embrace. Nature abhors a vacuum . “Finn, help me do what I need to do.”

“My love, you can’t expect me to help you be possessed.” Finn’s thoughts came to him full of bleak despair.

“No. Help me. Lend me your strength, your fire.”

“I don’t under— Oh. My hero, this is perilous.”

“So help me, damn it.”

The wendigo’s touch flung him into an empty blackness. Gripping cold stole his thoughts—the yawning chasm of need ripped a scream of despair from him. Finn came to him, stood shoulder to shoulder with him against the dark.

“The things I do for you, my hero.”

Diego didn’t answer. He used Finn’s love as an anchor, a starting point, and began to weave a different sort of lightning, a liquid stream of magic into which he poured his own warmth, his kindness, his love of the world.

Rather than hurl this magic, he poured it into the void, on and on, though it seemed only a drop in an ocean of frigid emptiness. He wavered, uncertain and afraid.

“Go on, my love. I think you have it right.” Finn’s essence embraced his, shoring him up, lending him courage. A bright pinprick appeared in the void, the first sign of thaw in an endless winter.

The wendigo shrieked and flung up a wall of howling ice to block the fledgling light, a shield behind which to mount its own attack.

Bolt after bolt of black despair slammed into Diego.

“ Failure ,” the wind shrieked at him. “ At everything you set your hand to. A fraud, a sham. Your every effort comes to nothing. You bring only pain to those who love you.”

He faltered and dropped some of the threads he wove.

His father’s voice thundered in his memory, ‘ I won’t believe my son is a…

a faggot! It’s a stage, an illness…’ The voice of his college advisor joined him.

‘ It’s not as if everyone can be Hemingway, Diego.

We have dozens of students come through here each year who write better than you…

’ Mitch’s sneer came back to him . ‘Like you’re fucking Jack Kerouac or something.

Well, you’re not. And you never will be… ’

“Don’t listen to them, beloved!” Finn shouted down the memories. “ It rakes your thoughts for your darkest moments! Don’t listen! You are brave and strong and…and a bard worthy of the High King’s table!”

A laugh bubbled up despite the barrage of despair.

The laugh shoved the darkness back a hair, and for a moment, he caught a glimpse of himself through Finn’s eyes, a shining being of white light, shot through with threads of golden magic.

He spread his arms and reached out once more, stretching further into the bright web.

The trees, the birds, the streams, the very ground beneath their feet all contributed to the outpouring of heat.

The bridges of connections multiplied into infinite webs, every cricket, every blade of grass, every life lending its light, its strength, its notes.

The weaving became a song so bright and complex, Diego’s heart threatened to burst with joy.

With a piercing howl, the wendigo attacked, claws and teeth of ice sinking into him, trying to rip him away from Finn and from the tendrils of magic. Diego grappled with it, discordant notes knifing into the magic as they raged back and forth, heat of the sun battling the howling chill of the void.

The liquid stream of song had taken root in the core of the wendigo’s being and would not be dislodged.

Note by note, the void filled, the light growing in the vast chasm of despair.

Diego clung fast as he felt the monster weaken.

In desperation, it tried to attack Finn and hurled a bolt of black rage at his essence.

Finn answered by throwing up a wall of blue fire to block the missile and adding his own voice to the song.

The wendigo shrieked, clawing at the magic invading its being, tearing itself to pieces as the emptiness filled. The chill dissipated, the light of the world melted its heart of ice. There was peace where there had been emptiness, calm where there had been raging despair.

The howling wind died down as the wendigo’s essence scattered. Diego found himself back in the woods by the tree where Finn lay. The malevolent spirit no longer inhabited the world. Only its magic remained to join the song, a whisper on the wind.

“ Carino , will you be all right?”

“Won’t be but a moment, my hero. I need a shape that doesn’t require a backbone,” Finn said as his bear shape contracted into a large bumblebee.

“All right. I’m just so tired now.”

Finn snorted, an odd sound from a bumblebee. “I would think so, m’dear. You only worked more magic in a night than I’ve seen any other man work in a lifetime.”