Princess of Wands Read online

  “I still haven’t had a live one.” Janea sighed theatrically, then brightened, putting on the face of a little girl. “But the year is young!” she added with a giggle.

  “You will,” the man said, turning to Barbara and grinning. “Just like the woman of the hour.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Barb said, firmly. “I’m here to learn. I’m learning just listening. What was it you were fighting?”

  “A Tikoloshe,” the man said, shrugging. “South African. Preys on women, but most of the various demons do. It had been haunting rave clubs in the Baltimore area, probably summoned or brought by one of the immigrant witch doctors. We finally found its lair and, well…”

  “You haven’t been introduced,” Janea said. “Hjalmar Johanneson, this of course is Barbara Everette.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Barb said, taking his hamlike hand.

  “Likewise,” Hjalmar replied. “My mundane name is Quenton Barber. I used to work in a plywood mill. These days I do construction when the Foundation doesn’t have need of my services.”

  “I take it… well, actually I don’t know,” Barb said, uncertainly. “Do you get paid?”

  “Quite well,” Janea said, laughing. “The Foundation draws on various sources of funding. Quite a bit from churches that are aware of our mission for example. About a third from the Catholic church alone. But, of course, when we’re called in as ‘consultants,’ the Foundation is paid and then we get paid.” She paused again and bounced up and down in her chair so that her breasts jiggled like gelatin. “I’m saving up for a boobie job!”

  “The one thing you don’t need is a boobie job,” Hjalmar said, shaking his head.

  “I’d sort of been wondering,” Barbara admitted, still unsure if she got paid and if she did how she would explain that to Mark. “But to get back to the point. You knew it was susceptible to… what? Iron and fire?”

  “Part of training,” Janea said, shrugging. “There’s a bunch of books you’ll be getting. Some of the information is…” She shrugged again.

  “The thing about demonology,” Hjalmar said, scratching deeply at his beard, “is that most of the source books are… semi-fictional. Very few serious researchers realize that demons and such are real. And witnesses tend to be… well, any eyewitness is a poor witness. They generally can’t get their heads around the reality of demons, especially, and they see things that aren’t there even if there’s not a glamour. Or they miss things that are there. And as to dispelling methods and the like, normally demons are only engaged in battle. There have been very few captured and studied and those only by the Foundation and a few other groups. Then there’s the fact that they’re so… incredibly abundant in history. So you study these books, most of them more alchemical than scientific in nature, and hope like Hel the source book is right and your identification is right. Take the Tikoloshe, for example. The primary source book doesn’t list it as having reversed feet. But all of our case studies have recorded it as having reversed feet. Nor does The Book have it as susceptible to iron and fire. But it is. Cold steel, as well, if you add power to the equation.”

  “So if HRT had used, say, bayonets?” Barb asked.

  “Wouldn’t have worked,” Hjalmar said. “Unless they were meteoric iron. Well, pure elemental iron would probably work. I had to have Frey work through me to dispel the demon. Even then it was touch and go. I could feel its power working against the god’s and it had built up a lot of power in its killings. But we, together, were able to overcome it.”

  “HRT has first class shooters,” Janea said. “But they don’t have anyone that channels. There’s some talk of rearming them, but they generally don’t do Special Circumstances and trying to explain why they’re taking courses in special entry techniques using, oh, swords and crossbows…” Pause. “ ‘Why, yes, Congressman,’ ” she said in very businesslike tones, “ ‘we’re quite serious about that line item…’ I can just see it now.”

  “Generally if we know that we’re going to need heavy help, we can call on the experts,” the man said, grinning faintly. “Such as Opus Dei.”

  “Opus Dei?” Barbara said, aghast. “That’s a Catholic religious group.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Janea said, laughing. “That’s all. ‘Hallo,’ “ she said in a thick and bad Italian accent, “ ‘My name is Cardinal Enrico Sarducci. You killed my father. Prepare to die!’ ”

  “Sure,” Hjalmar agreed, laughing. “That’s all they are. But when you see a bunch of guys in cassocks and collars carrying ballistic nylon bags show up, you know the shit has well and truly hit the fan. I think they might have called in Opus for Almadu, if they’d known how powerful he had become. But even Opus doesn’t have a channeler as strong as you are. They are, though, very well shielded by their faith and their sacraments. They could have, oh, cleared the way for a more powerful channeler. There are a few in the Church,” he admitted, grudgingly.

  “The Wiccans seem to produce the strongest channelers,” Janea said, seriously. “But their strongest channelers are, as far as I know, exclusively nonviolent. Full up vegan, sky clad, the works. And really nonviolent. The top operators are all from fairly minor sects who have a strong connection to a fairly weak god. Take Dartho; his god is virtually unknown and not particularly powerful.”

  “And very chaotic,” Hjalmar added, rubbing his beard thoughtfully.

  “And chaotic,” Janea admitted. “He might even be a face of the Jester or Pan. But Dartho has such a strong connection to him that he can get more power from less source than some who have stronger deities as backing.” She paused and sighed, putting on a little girl face, mooning like at a rock star. “Ahhh, Darthoooo… he’s so… sick,” she finished, changing back to her “normal” personality. “His god, well, he’s really into pain. Voluntary, mind you, but so was Aztec sacrifice, certainly the greater sacrifices. You know what BDSM is?”

  “Yes,” Barbara admitted. “Sort of.”

  “Well, can you imagine a good sect based around BDSM?” Janea asked.

  “No,” Barb said, definitely.

  “I actually can,” Janea said. “But it’s a stretch. And that’s the… nature of Dartho’s sect, of his god. They feed the god with pain, voluntarily derived, and the god feeds them with power.”

  “That’s sick,” Barbara agreed, glancing over at the table Dartho had occupied and finding all of “his” group gone.

  “You do what you have to for power,” Janea said, shrugging. “And sometimes more,” she added in a husky contralto, wriggling sexily.

  “Our gods have, for millennia, been weak,” the man said, frowning at Barb, then shrugging. “They were displaced by the White God.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it,” Barbara said, wincing.

  “No, of course not,” Janea interjected. “But it’s one of the reasons Christianity is a sore point. Especially Protestantism, which doesn’t recognize saints.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Barb asked, totally confused.

  Janea and Hjalmar looked at each other for a moment as if trying to decide which one had to tell the little girl that Santa wasn’t real.

  “Well,” Hjalmar said, blowing out. “You see, most saints are old gods that got… assimilated by the religion of the White God. Michael, for example, is probably an avatar of Mars and Frey, who are almost certainly the same god. There are others. But when the Protestants took away even those souls, those prayers, it truly bit the old gods in the butt. So they sort of tolerate Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, but they’ve got a bug up their butt about Protestants. And… some people tend to bring that annoyance along with them. I mean, most of us went in the direction that we took because we didn’t find normal society… normal. For us. Add to that, in this group, actual communication with their gods, and the gods having a case of the ass with Christianity and, well…”

  “I’m not the most popular girl in town,” Barbara said.

  “You’re not the most popular girl in town,” Janea agreed. �
��But… you’re clearly a woman of great inner strength and beauty. That simply shows through in everything you do and say. And you have a strong channel to one of the most potent sources of power on earth. From our perspective,” she added, gesturing around, “you are also a fell warrior. So we Asatru accept you as if you were our own, despite being a representative of the White God. For your warrior skills if nothing else. Dress her in a chain-mail bikini and she’d be the talk of the town!” she added, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Ooh, we could go around as a pair of twins! Twins always make more…”

  “Not on your life,” Barbara said, laughing at the woman’s constant change of character. “I most certainly would be the talk of Jackson, if I ever wore something like that. Even in private,” she added, somewhat bitterly.

  “But we are all one in this struggle,” the man interjected. “Don’t take the occasional odd reactions to heart. We know that you are a fellow warrior and accept you as such. It’s simply hard for some of us to grok your presence here.”

  “Grok?” Barb said. “I feel as if half the time you’re speaking an alien language!”

  “Well,” Janea said, laughing. “In this case, he was. It’s from a science fiction novel called Stranger in a Strange Land…”

  “That’s from the Bible,” Barbara said, frowning.

  “Many of Heinlein’s titles were,” Hjalmar said.

  “I won’t get into the story,” Janea continued. “But, to grok means to understand something so completely that it is part of you. Reading Stranger was one of the things that made it easy for me to become a dancer.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Barb said.

  “I could sense your shock when Sharice told you,” Janea said, nodding. “You hid it well but part of my power is understanding and reading emotions that aren’t visible. But… well…” She paused and tried to figure out how to explain to this nice “church lady” why she did what she did. “There are several reasons that I’m a dancer. I’ve never even decided which is the most important. One reason, and the easiest to explain, is that it’s supplementary income to the Foundation. We get paid when we’re on assignment, but only then. So everyone has to have a ‘day job’ except the real pros like Otillia and Hertha, who are so busy it’s not funny. And it needs to be a day job you can take time off or simply walk away from. I’m a top dancer at several major clubs. When I tell the club owners ‘I’m going away for a couple of weeks on another assignment’ they don’t blink. And they don’t give me any hassle when I turn back up. And the money’s very good. I pull in a grand pretty much every night I’m working and more, sometimes quite a bit more, on some nights.”

  “That’s a lot of money, but…” Barbara said.

  “You’re worried about my soul,” Janea said, smiling. “Asatru does not hold the same things as sin that the White God holds as sin. My patron, Freya, can be seen as another face of Ishtar/Hathor, the God Mother, Aphrodite/Venus if you will, the All-Woman and Mother of Fertility. She is my patron and through my use of my body to bring pleasure, I worship her.”

  “Okay,” Barb said, cocking her head and frowning. “Now, that I have a hard time with.”

  “But can you accept it?” Janea asked.

  “For you, perhaps,” Barbara said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “Not for me.”

  “Of course not,” Janea said, nodding seriously. “Your White God would be most angry with you if you chose my path. But my path worships my goddess. I not only dance, I am a very expensive call-girl; a priestess of Freya should be paid through the nose as a form of worship. Men come into my hands, angry, upset, mad at their wives, having difficulty at work. I soothe them, I placate them, I bring them joy and teach them to bring themselves joy, and I don’t mean with their hand but with their spirit. When men come away from me, they take a mystical memory, but no sense of bonding. This, too, my goddess gives to me. And they return to their lives, to their mates, with a better sense of balance in the world.”

  “Wait,” Barb said, closing her eyes and raising one hand. “You have sex with married men?”

  “Very few unmarried men can afford me,” Janea said, laughing. “I’m neither cheap nor easy, honey,” she added in a credible Mae West imitation. “I adore the kindness of strangers. But I assure you I have saved far more marriages than I have broken,” she continued, seriously. “And those that I broke, needed to be broken. Parasitical marriages with one partner sucking the life from the other like a leech or an ugly succubus. I remember one partner I had, an older gentleman and quite sweet. His wife had died and he married a much younger woman. She was sucking him dry, emotionally, and giving him nothing, not even her body, in return. He came to me, suggested by a friend who knew me. And when he went away he divorced the little tramp and sent her packing.”

  “Okay,” Barbara said. “Now that I can… grok.”

  “Men who come to me are either very rich and in marriages where neither partner is truly bonded to the other,” Janea said, “or simply well-to-do and in dire straits. They pay through the nose for my time and in turn I give them… healing and understanding of where their hurts center. It is my gift. It was a gift I first practiced because of the dictates in Stranger, and other Heinlein novels, trying to be a ‘Heinlein Girl.’ But later I came to an understanding of my place in the world, and of my goddess. This gave it a spiritual dimension that had been… limited if not entirely lacking. And, in turn, it led me to this place, at this time, to explain this to you, who would make a wonderful hetaera. But I hope you never do, for your White God would surely turn his face from you.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not,” Barbara said, shrugging. “He is merciful beyond reason or understanding. However, my own… upbringing would never allow me to be so… open…”

  “Wanton?” Janea said, pouting theatrically, arching her back and stretching. “Sens-you-ous?” she added, raising an eyebrow and writhing in the chair.

  “I’ll stick with… open,” Barb replied, grinning. “I can arch with the best of them, sweetheart! But, within me, if I felt it to be a sin, that would damage my relationship with God. I have enough demons to contend with; I don’t need more.”

  “We none of us do,” Hjalmar said, nodding. “But, remember, they are different for the different creeds. Wicca is not so much different from Christianity as they would like. It is a constructed religion. Well, all neopagan religions are constructed religions. But Wicca is very much a constructed religion and they know it. And it was constructed in a very Christian environment and many of the ‘evils’ in Wicca are Christian evils, evils that never would have mattered to, say, the druids that they harken back to. Their demons are much like yours, the fear of anger and so on and so forth. But for the Asatru,” he said, standing up and flexing, “power is our highest calling. We are not a slave religion. Fear is our demon. Death in battle, our eyes red and staring, in anger so great it is transcendent, this is our calling,” he boomed, his face hard. He closed his eyes, suddenly, and breathed deep and long, his jaw flexing, until finally he relaxed, sighing.

  “Thus easily does a god take one once you become fully open to your channel,” he said, sitting down, shakily. “I simply opened a channel to my inner aggression, to show you the true nature of Asatru, and Frey took me. I think, to take a look at you. But his warrior anger was filling me, calling me to battle even in this place of peace. Someday,” he said, wistfully, quietly. “Someday I will be called to a hopeless battle and my god will fill me and I will berserk into mine enemies and be slain. Then shall I be taken up upon the arms of the Valkyrie and ride with them to Valhalla for all eternity…”

  “I think I finally understand why I came here,” Barbara said after a long pause.

  “To hear the word of Asatru?” Janea said, grinning.

  “Perhaps,” Barb replied, seriously. “I hold a great deal of anger in my soul. I’m very careful to not let it out, to Witness as a Christian should, every day of my life. And the anger at petty people, daily frustrations, I sti
ll feel that those are sins. Turn the other cheek is the right way to deal with those. But… I wonder if… if righteous anger, the anger of Samson in the temple and the anger of David, if this is not a facet of… God.”

  “The White God has been a very angry and vengeful god on occasion,” Hjalmar said. “Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.”

  “But not since the Coming of Jesus,” Barbara pointed out. “Jesus was a man of peace and he brought peace wherever he went. Well… except to the moneychangers in the temple,” Barb admitted. “Even with the Devil he simply ignored his temptations.”

  “True,” Janea said. “But what if the Devil had attacked the children who were listening to His sermon?” she asked, cocking one shapely eyebrow. “Those that he called forward to sit at his very feet. Would he have been so forgiving?”

  “Probably not,” Barbara had to admit. “I’m surprised that you know the Bible that well,” she added.

  “Well, it used to be a case of know thine enemy,” Janea admitted. “I mean, I generally work in the Southeast. I especially did when I was just getting started. And, well, the Bible-thumpers…”

  “But you’ll also find that learning a lot of comparative religion is a good idea in this job,” the man said. “There’s no religion or myth you want to overlook. The foundation has an extensive library and I wish I could read absolutely everything in it but I don’t have the time.”

  “I’ve read the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran,” Janea said, ticking off the list on her manicured nails. “Each in multiple translations. And the Apocrypha. And the Dead Sea Scrolls translations. As well as all the Vedas and shamanistic Buddhism tracts. And I still feel like I only scratched the surface.”

  “America is a country of immigrants,” Hjalmar pointed out. “In, oh say Borneo, you’ll only find the spirits of Borneo.”