Page 19 of Try As I Smite
“What is it?”
“A windigo.”
“The flesh eaters? I thought they were extinct?”
“Apparently not.”
Again, Delilah gathered her power inside her. This type of creature, malevolence incarnate, wouldn’t die by physical means. She needed to send its spirit to the hell reserved for evil. She needed to guide it into the runes she’d already drawn on the ground. A trap that would funnel it where she wanted. This would’ve been a lot easier to do with surprise on her side. Dammit.
Wind whipped down the alley, stirring papers and loose trash, sending it swirling around the creature. Sensing where that power was coming from now, it turned away from the boy, stalking toward her. Delilah backed up carefully, focused on the words, on the power. It should be slowing down, given what she was throwing at it. But it wasn’t. Instead it kept coming at her, fast.
She scurried to keep out of reach, while trying to get it to move to its right a few feet. Except the focus she needed to perform this complicated of a ritual was slowing down her physical reaction times. A mistake she realized the second the thing swiped at her with its extra-long arm, backhanding her hard. Delilah hit the brick of the building wall, her head ringing with the crack of sound from the impact, then dropped to her side.
“I’ve got it!” The boy’s voice penetrated the stunned stupor clouding her mind.
She sat up to find those electric lines wrapping around the windigo, keeping it from coming any closer to her, though it strained against the bindings.
“Pull it to the right!” she yelled.
Somehow, face contorted with determination, the boy managed to shift the massive creature. The second it entered her circle, the lines on the ground lit up, as though glowing from underneath.
Seeing her opening, Delilah leaped to her feet and continued chanting, calling upon magic as ancient as the universe itself. The winds whipped harder and the windigo howled like a hyena, high-pitched and creepy. One of the electric lines snapped, and it surged closer, struggling against the boy’s bonds, reaching for her with taloned fingers.
“I can’t hold it much longer,” he called, still out of sight, blocked by the body of the creature they were working together to destroy.
Delilah whispered the last of the words.
The windigo’s scream changed pitch, turning frenetic as the thing shook from antlers to bony feet. Then the rest of its body disintegrated, one piece at a time. The screeching was the last thing to go, cut off abruptly.
But did we kill the demon inside the creature? Or just send it back to the hells?
The wind ceased the instant it was gone, and suddenly the original Delilah faced the boy across a divide of darkened alley, a dusting of snow falling over them, both of them breathing heavily.
A glance in that back corner, and the demon was gone already.
The old her was still catching her breath, and tossed him a smile. “You did good, kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” he said. Not cocky or whiny. Just stating a fact.
Delilah tipped her head, regarding him more closely. “No. I can see you’ve been a man longer than your age would indicate.”
He drew his shoulders back. “I had no choice.”
That deep, aching sadness lingered in the tones. Only now Delilah knew what he meant. She’d witnessed the aftermath. Watched a young boy try to contain his hurt and fear and the fact that his world had been ripped apart while no one helped him cope. Not really.
A flash of images hit her mind, as sometimes happened with her ability to See.
Oh my gods. She’d forgotten all about that small prediction that day.
It had happened so fast, been so simple. And nothing that required her intervention. Images of the boy as a man. Gaining more and more magical power. Taking an important position among his people. Doing great things—selfless things, for the sake of his kind.
“I foresee a future of leadership for you,” she heard the words coming from her own mouth, even as the memory resounded in her mind. “You’ll become a helper to those who need it most. A protector. A good man. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.”
She nodded at the human, out cold but still bleeding. “For now…help him.”
Before the boy could take a step closer, she whispered another series of words, these faster and easier than the spell to vanquish the windigo, and disappeared.
In the same instant, she found her current self back outside that alley, standing beside Alasdair the man. He turned to her, face like a granite wall, unreadable. “That was you.”
