Troll Tunnels Read online

  Troll Tunnels

  A Boston Technowitch Novel

  Erin M. Hartshorn

  Hartshorn Publishing, a division of Eimarra Press

  Copyright © 2018 Erin M. Hartshorn

  Cover Design: Deranged Doctor Design

  http://www.derangeddoctordesign.com

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously or are entirely fictional.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via e-mail to [email protected].

  Published by Eimarra Press, Bethlehem, PA

  All rights reserved.

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  For Kevin

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Untitled

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Untitled

  The Boston Technowitch Series

  Chapter 1

  November was cooler than October had been, with the occasional frost on the sidewalk and trees in the mornings, but we were nowhere near as cold as Boston would get. Still, I pulled my leather jacket tight against the chill as I headed north from my home in Chinatown. The jacket didn’t prevent various magical pricklings from creeping across my skin, raising goosebumps and the occasional shiver: The depth of the trolls, the soaring and lilting magic of the Lung dragon, even the far-off nails-on-a-chalkboard call of a siren were familiar companions on my commute to work. The more adept I grew with my magic, the farther away I could sense them.

  Familiar but less welcome were the dark, oily coils of magic crawling over my arms while I was still a block away from the Wicked Whatever Coffeehouse — the power of Tiamat, the Mesopotamian goddess of sea and chaos, which emanated from witches who had bargained with her for power.

  Yes, she’s real, even if you never heard of her before, as are most beings ever worshipped as gods. More, the gods can act as patrons for witches and give power in exchange for fealty. Which is how we almost ended up with Tiamat’s coils of darkness wandering the streets of Boston.

  So I wasn’t surprised to enter the coffee shop and see a witch who honored her sitting at one of our tables, sipping coffee, and talking on her phone in maybe Dutch or Danish — some language where the words might almost sound English but her inflection told me they weren’t. “Begrijp je het plan? We moeten het ondergrondse heiligdom bereiken naar de godin. De magie zal er sterkst zijn.” Her eyes flicked over me as I entered, and her words switched to Russian.

  I’d seen the witch around before. Not at the weekly gatherings of local witches, which I had finally agreed to start attending, but here, in the coffee shop I managed, with others who followed her patron. I hadn’t expected her to come back — she’d been very dismissive of me in the conversation I overheard last time she’d been here. Guess the coffee had impressed her. Or maybe the wards I’d set up.

  However, the words I caught, or thought I caught, before she switched to Russian in her conversation bothered me — plan, underground, god. She might be using “underground” to refer to witches in general, or the way the Tiamat witches always looked at each other with recognition but rarely spoke to each other in public — hidden connections, a network not open to outside examination. “God” might simply acknowledge the witches’ relationship to Tiamat — she was their patron, and she was also a deity, or had been worshipped as such. The words could mean nothing more than that she was talking to another witch.

  But the words niggled at me, sounding familiar. Had I read something in one of the diaries I had that belonged to one of her fellow Tiamat witches? I’d gone to college with Clay, dated his best friend, and never knew that Clay was interested in magic — or me. Earlier this year, I’d discovered the truth, and in the process had wound up with all his journals where he discussed magic and his patron, Tiamat. This evening, I’d be going through those journals to see if I could find out more about this stark underground plan, if that was what she had said.

  I was bothered more by understanding any of her words. If whomever she was speaking to understood the Russian as well as whatever other language she was using, why not just use that so it wouldn’t matter if she was overheard?

  This thought kept coming back to me as I greeted Ximena — one of my assistant managers — then hung my coat in my office and washed my hands before heading back out front to check on the general state of supplies. A couple of the other tables were occupied by regulars, including a pair of the art students who had done our mural, but we weren’t inordinately busy. That let me keep half an eye — or an ear, anyway — on the witch until she decided to leave. At one point, she mentioned Tiamat, and her eyes slid sideways to check me out, to see whether I was watching her. Could she tell? I didn’t know, but I continued with the tidying of the pastry case as though nothing had happened.

  After I got home from work, the evening was filled with the usual routine of dinner, cuddling and reading with my twins, checking to make sure that everything was ready for them to take to school in the morning, and baths with all the delays of “I’m not ready to get in yet” and “I’ll be out in five more minutes.” With one thing and another, I didn’t pull out Clay’s journals until after the kids were in bed. I might want to know what the witches of Tiamat were up to, but family came first.

  Curled into a corner of the couch, my feet tucked under me, I opened one of Clay’s later journals — one of the ones where I was certain I’d seen him talking about plans before he decided that he was going to use me as Tiamat’s avatar. Some of the pages were still impossible to look at — the drawings would squirm, or my eyes would slide away, or worse yet, I would feel as though I were falling into the page. I’d learned to keep my eyes focused to one side as I turned pages and to only look back once I was sure the book wasn’t going to try to eat my brain like something out of Lovecraft.

  If the witch at the coffee shop hadn’t switched languages so abruptly, hadn’t mentioned Tiamat, hadn’t darted that sideways look at me to see whether I was listening, I probably wouldn’t have thought as much of her choice of words. Coming from Europe, she might mean the T when talking about an underground. Or she could have been talking about power lines that weren’t in danger with the next major ice storm, or the name of some bar I didn’t know, or probably half a dozen other things.

  But she had done those things, acted in every way as if she had something she wanted, needed, to hide from me. Given my history with Clay, I couldn’t afford to give her the benefit o
f the doubt. I had to look.

  No sign yet of the word “underground.” I continued flipping pages.

  A swirl of ink three pages on drew my eye, and it took me a few seconds more to realize I’d been snared by another one of Clay’s little traps. Putting my finger between the pages to keep my place, I closed the book and blinked to clear my vision. It was wrong to think of the pages as traps — that implied that Clay suspected someone other than him would be reading his journals. No, these odd swirls represented something else, but I wasn’t sure what. Not bindings — I knew what those felt like, and that wasn’t this. Maybe he’d put them there to draw himself in somehow? Could he have been trying to contact Tiamat?

  I knew what Maggie — the first other witch I’d met — would say to that. “That’s not the way magic works.”

  For years, I’d taken her word for most things to do with magic, even though everything she said went counter to my own experience of magic. Recently, I’d begun to wonder if maybe she was only seeing a tiny piece of the elephant, which would explain my own abilities — and which meant that I couldn’t discount any idea unless I saw personally that it was wrong.

  Not that having a hypothesis about the markings changed the way I would approach them. My interactions with Tiamat hadn’t been friendly, and I was pretty sure she’d do her best to destroy me if I reached out to her.

  I sipped my chardonnay and took a deep breath. I still needed to look for anything that might explain the words I’d overheard today.

  Another third of the journal flipped by before I saw the words “beneath Boston.” That definitely counted as underground. I stopped scanning and backed up to the previous page to start at the beginning of the passage. One thing I could say about Clay was that he had neat handwriting. Unfortunately, there were only a couple short paragraphs before he switched subjects.

  The shrine was moved across the ocean a thousand and more years ago, though not by human hands. I think they sought to keep us from Her, but the Shining One will not be denied. It lies beneath Boston, and if I can find it, we can use it. The others agree that I should try.

  Perhaps I won’t tell them right away. What could I do with access to it myself, unwatched but by Her? Yes, I think that will be best.

  Yeah, that second paragraph was just a little creepy. The first told me what I was looking for, though, if not where. Beneath Boston was about as nebulous a location as you could get.

  No matter how much I stared at the words, they didn’t change. No new information, no elaboration. I must have missed something, unless he didn’t see a reason to add details about the shrine — he would know what he meant, after all. All I could be sure of was that he was talking about a shrine to Tiamat beneath Boston — underground, as the witch today had said — and that the witches wanted to use it, most likely to aid their plans to bring Tiamat to Boston.

  I had to find the shrine first. I hoped I could figure out what to do, how to stop them, before it was too late.

  Whispers came from the twins’ room. Shaking my head in exasperation, I called, “Go to sleep. You had all day to play, and you have school in the morning.”

  Silence, but I felt Tina’s magic pop like a bubble splashing my face. “And no magic. If you’re that eager to practice, you can get up early and do it before breakfast.”

  This time, she did answer me, or at least started to. “But Mo-om…”

  I empathized. I’d rather stay up late and sleep in every morning, too. Unfortunately, the world’s schedules were not set up for those of us who favored night hours. These days, I was often at work before the sun was up.

  “Sleep. Now.”

  There were no more protests, but I stared at the hallway, deep in thought. Sometimes, I didn’t feel that different from Tina, trying to figure things out on my own and being damned stubborn about it. The primary difference was that if she messed up, nobody was going to get hurt. Lucky her.

  Speaking of hurting others, Chris, who was training me in healing magic, had given me some meditation homework to familiarize myself with the flow of energy in my body. I needed to do that before I went to bed, too.

  Chapter 2

  The Monday lunch rush at the coffee shop — with extra coffee orders for those who’d had late weekend nights — was over, and I was wiping down tables when my cell rang. As usual, my mentor Carole’s call was perfectly timed. Last year, I would have chalked it up to her Sight, as she had stronger vision than anyone I knew, witch or not. However, a brush with too much magic had left me outside of Sight, so it was probably common sense on her part — it was after lunch, so I wouldn’t be quite as busy.

  She didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Things are getting darker.”

  If she could skip the chitchat, so could I. “Darker as in hard to See, or as in hard to look at?”

  It had only been a few weeks since I’d had my less-than-successful showdown with a dark muse, after which Carole mentioned that she’d Seen we were going to be facing a lot of trouble as a group. Where we, at the very least, meant her, her niece Maggie, and me, but possibly included most of the other witches in the Boston area.

  “Both is certainly more likely,” she replied dryly, “but I meant the first. I can see that there is darkness approaching, an overwhelming darkness that’s going to hit us all, although not at the same time — but I can’t see what it is.”

  I pondered her words as I glanced out the window to reassure myself that no, it wasn’t the weather that was dark. It was a sunny early November day, though the dry leaves blowing along the ground as well as the variety of jackets and sweaters on the passersby promised at least a bit of briskness to the air. “Are you sure that it’s the same darkness for all of us, then?”

  “That eager to have more challenges?”

  “Not really.” I’d finished with the tables, and the condiment bar was still in good order, so I moved back behind the register, dropping the wet cloth into a sudsy tub as I did. “I’ve got enough going on already. I’d like to take a hard pass on more complications.”

  Her laugh was rueful. “If only it were that easy. Hang on a second.” The sound flattened at her end, as it did when she erected a privacy ward to prevent others from overhearing her. “Unfortunately, I think you’re right. There is more than one thing moving in the darkness. We already knew that Tiamat was trying to come through — succeeded in coming partially through — but the walls are weakening.”

  I didn’t really want to discuss any of that, even if there was no one else in earshot at the moment. “You sound like the trolls.”

  “That may be the first time anyone has ever said that to me.” She sounded amused for a moment, then reverted to her serious mien. “Look, Pepper, when the darkness comes after me, come to my office.”

  “What if it comes for me first? Or that’s not where you are?”

  “Pepper.” She sighed. “Do you think I would say ‘when’ if I meant ‘if’? And no, that won’t be where I am. But I’ll leave something here for you. You’re going to need it.”

  “Then why not just give it to me now?”

  “Because I don’t know what it is yet. I’ll probably get to See just enough to leave it before I die.” I could hear the shrug in her voice. “I only get glimpses, and that not frequently. Prophetic Sight is even rarer than true Sight. In this case, I saw you talking to Maggie, telling her I’d left something for you.”

  “I thought I’d stepped outside the Sight?”

  “For the most part, yes. And it’s possible that’s why I’m having such a hard time Seeing things — anything that involves you is going to be extra murky. As it is, I can only see the largest events, darkly, and I can’t even be certain of them.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that you’re reasonably certain there’s a future, that something bad might happen, and that I’m going to live longer than you. Does that about sum it up?”

  “In your usual flippant fashion, yes. I honestly do not understand why Professor Dimitriou
still remembers you fondly from his class.”

  “Because I caused so many horse laughs?”

  “That was bad, even for you.” She didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to point out his status as a centaur. I knew what she meant. Or more to the point, she had recognized my pun and didn’t approve. “You know, he told me that you’d promised at your reunion to stop in and catch up. I’m reasonably certain you haven’t.”

  Professor Dimitriou had been one of my favorite teachers in college, and I felt guilty about not keeping my promise. Learning his true nature had thrown me for a bit of a loop, but that was no excuse. I lowered my cellphone so I could see the screen and tapped the calendar icon. Although she couldn’t see me, I shook my head. “Couldn’t you have reminded me over the summer? There’s just no way right now. Between my work and family obligations and him getting ready for the end of the semester—”

  “Hmmm.” Not a thoughtful sound, but one of disapproval. “There will always be something, including work and family.”

  “Maybe.” My voice wasn’t hopeful. “We’ll know the truth of that within a couple of weeks.”

  That being when the judge was going to rule on custody of my kids because Matt, their father, was suing for sole custody.

  She had the grace not to say anything about that. I knew she couldn’t See the outcome — goodness knows, I’d asked both her and Maggie — so all we could do was wait.