Shannon O'Reilly was bullied and everything his older sister wasn't. When his sister Sarah gives him a chance to change things through a single wish things don't go as planned.     I Wish: Book 4 Chapter 5 The Hunt is On By Amethyst

The afternoon classes seemed to drag on forever. Finally, though, we were released and Beth and I headed to Volleyball practice with Ellie, who went to get the equipment ready while Beth and I changed with the other girls on the team. At least Volleyball helped me to use up some of that nervous energy that had been building up since Khinara had disappeared with Lisa. I couldn’t help it, I had a really bad feeling about it. The practice also allowed me to focus both my mind and body on something else and it was a welcome distraction.

We had just showered, retrieved our things from our lockers, and were heading home with Elsaishe in my car when Beth reminded me, “We should call Mother Josephine’s sister before we get too involved in things tonight, sweetheart. We did promise her we’d help.”

“Thanks for reminding me my love, I’ll do it now.” I looked through my purse and came up with the post-it note that Mother Josephine had written her sister’s name and phone number on. Once I had the information in hand, I quickly tapped in the number on my phone and then tapped the call button.

It took a few rings before a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

“Umm… hello, Mrs. Dubois?” I inquired.

“Yes, who’s calling?”

I took a deep breath before speaking in my friendliest voice. “You don’t know me, but my name is Shannon O’Reilly, I go to St. Catherine’s and Mother Josephine suggested that I call. She thought that my friends and I might be able to help support your daughter. We could hang out with her and get to know one another a bit and maybe help her to see that she’s not alone.”

“Oh, yes! My sister told me earlier this afternoon that you would be calling. I’m… not really sure what to do about Michelle. We’re worried about her. She won’t talk to us about what’s going on with her since she came out to us last year, she doesn’t leave the house much except for school, and she spends most of the time that she is home in her room.” Her voice was low, and I could hear the heartbreak in it.

“Do you think that we could maybe come to your home to meet her later this week? Maybe Thursday?” I asked. “I’m kind of busy tonight and tomorrow and Wednesday we have Volleyball practice, so it would be almost dinner time by the time we’d be ready to meet her. Thursday we could come right after school though.” As much as I wanted to get right on this we still had Lisa to worry about and it might take a few days to find her. If we didn’t find her by Thursday though, rescuing her might be a moot point.

“You want to come to see her here? I thought that you would want to meet Michelle at the mall or something, and getting out of the house would do her some good.” Mrs. Dubois responded. She didn’t sound against the idea, just surprised.

I began to calmly explain my reasoning. “With all due respect Ma’am, if we’re going to build a friendship with Michelle, help her feel better about herself, and show her that she’s not alone then I think that we need to build that relationship on honesty and trust. We need to be open with her about why we’re meeting her and we need our first meeting to be somewhere that she feels safe and secure. Somewhere that she can end things if they don’t go well. I don’t think the mall would be good for that and I don’t want it to look like we might be manipulating her by having her go somewhere where she isn’t comfortable. Real friends don’t do that to one another.”

There was a pause on the other end before she spoke again. “My sister was right, you have a good head on your shoulders, Shannon. Michelle usually gets home around three-thirty so she’ll probably be home by the time you can get here from St. Catherine’s. Let me give you our address.”

The address was pretty easy to remember but I added the info to my phone along with the phone number by adding Mrs. Dubois to my contacts list. By the time we had gotten home, I had also looked up the address to get a general idea of where it was. It was practically on the other side of the city and it would likely take us a good forty-five minutes to get there from school on Thursday. We could take mostly back roads though so I thought that it might be a good time for me to get some more driving practice in. I really wanted to get my license by December if possible. Sarah said that I was doing well so far and I had done a few short drives in my car with Beth as well, though she couldn’t legally teach me.

Everyone was already gathered in the living room when we stepped inside the house and Sarah had prepared a platter of cheese, crackers, veggies, and her special chipotle ranch dip so we could have a quick meal while we were planning our evening search for Lisa. From the looks of the city map that was laid out we had quite a bit of work ahead of us too. While they had been invisibly surveilling the city by air in their Celestial forms earlier in the day Sarah and Annie had sensed the presence of Demons in nine different locations. Even if we split up into three smaller groups we were going to have to hit at least three locations each, kill whatever Demons were there, and leave at least one alive long enough to grill for information. This could take all night, especially since neither Elsaishe nor I had a Celestial form to allow us to fly and remain invisible to mortals so that we could avoid traffic.

We had finished eating and were poring over the map when Sarah quickly jotted something down on three post-it notes, keeping one for herself, handing one to me, and the other to Mason. “The targets in the northern part of the city are spread fairly far apart and a good distance from here so I think that it would be best if Mason and Jennifer take the three to the northeast and Annie and I take the four to the northwest. Shannon, Ziralin, and Elsaishe, you’ll take the two locations to the south. One of those locations is on the University of Toronto campus, so you may have to use glamours so that you won’t be recognized and can blend in on the campus if you have to search in any places where there are people gathered.”

“We still have those fake ID’s from the Vampire hunt, Sis,” I suggested. “We can use those identities if we have blend in, they’re about the right age, and Ellie and Ziralin didn’t have much trouble with the glamours last time.

“Good idea Shannon,” Annie agreed with a nod. “You may need them for some reason, you should all take a change of clothes too. Your hunting gear might attract a bit too much attention on campus.”

“Couldn’t Ellie and Ziralin just include normal-looking clothes in the glamours?” Jennifer inquired.

Ellie shrugged as she replied. “We could, but it would be more complex and use more magick energy. It might give us away to any Demons.”

“…and if it did they would actively avoid us or attack us first,” Ziralin added. “It’s probably best that we put as little magick into the glamours as possible, so we’ll just change our hair and eye color, make our eyes and ears look more human, and make subtle changes to our faces to make us look older, just like we did last time.”

“Let’s get going then, I’ve written down the general area for each Demonic presence so you’ll know where to start looking, but if any of you feel like you’re going to be in over your head you call us, or Shannon can use a communication spell if things are looking really bad,” Sarah advised.

Our first target location was Tommy Thomson Park. It had started snowing since we had gotten home from volleyball practice and several centimeters of fresh powder already covered the trails that we were walking in search of our quarry. It was cold too, nearly minus twenty degrees Celsius and our breath was fogging as soon as it left our mouths. I found myself extremely glad that Sarah had spelled our Hunting clothes to protect us from the elements and to keep us comfortable in any weather. We had been walking the trails for over half an hour by the time that I could feel the excitement of discovery coming from my empathic link with Ziralin.

“You sense something?” It was more of an observation than a question since I knew that her magick sense and ability to detect demonic auras was more sensitive than my own.

My Fae girlfriend and Familiar nodded her pretty elven head and pointed to the south. “That way, I think that it’s somewhere close to the shoreline.” She took off at a run and Ellie and I quickly followed, though the two Fae were careful to set a pace that I could keep up with. We turned when the trail that we were on intersected another but stopped short when we spotted the footprints in the snow. “These are fresh, maybe five to ten minutes ago. I can still see the tread marks fairly easily. Men’s hiking boots I think, and from the depth of the indents in the snow it looks like he’s a pretty big guy.”

“Do you think he’s our guy?” Ellie asked with a frown, her hand reaching for her duffel bag. The bag contained the silver-coated swords that Ziralin had used before gaining her Celestial form and a paintball pistol with extra CO2 cartridges, paintballs, and two extra 7-ball clips. The ammunition had a little more stopping power against Demons though. I had enhanced the paint pellets much as I had the shotgun shells when we were in Tír na nÓg, by stuffing them full of pure holy magical energy and spelling them to explode and release that holy magick when they hit a demon. If they didn’t hit a Demon then they would just splatter like a regular paintball.

“It’s possible,” Ziralin replied as we jogged along the trail, following the tracks. “The tracks aren’t spaced like a person walking or running though, they’re uneven and dragging in places like he’s staggering. It could be some guy drinking out here who’s had a few too many, but I don’t see anything other than the tracks to make that a likely possibility.”

I nodded in agreement. While Ziralin had been examining the tracks I had been examining something else. There was dark magick at work here, it tasted like overripe cherries and vinegar and felt like satin wrapped in thorns or prickles. “I don’t think he’s drunk, at least not on alcohol. Do you feel that magick?”

“Yeah, it feels weird,” Ellie said, her hand still resting on the duffel bag. There’s some dark intent there, desire, and a sort of pulling sensation too. Do you think he’s been magically roofied?”

“Yeah, it’s got to be some sort of attraction spell, and it’s pulling him right toward that Demonic aura,” I told my cousin with a frown. Then we were off running again and near the shoreline of Lake Ontario by the time we saw a large man in a tan parka shuffling through the snow toward the water’s edge. I couldn’t let him reach that water, even if the Demon didn’t get him he’d likely drown or freeze to death. I used some of my stored magical energy, focusing my intent on the man pushing my desire upon the world and my target as I said, “Sleep.”

The man collapsed, falling to the shore about fifteen feet shy of the water. The second that my spell was cast and he hit the ground a bone-chilling shriek sounded through the evening air. The source was a woman, sort of. She had been mostly submerged so I hadn’t really seen her in the darkness until her shadowy form had emerged from the lake and ran for the man that I had felled with my spell. Ellie and Ziralin had seemingly caught the movement as well, because my cousin had cast several Faerie-fires to shed a little light on the situation and Ziralin had changed to her Celestial form, her wings spread and her twin swords linked at the pommels to form her holy bow.

The Demoness had barely left the water when the first bolt of holy light left Ziralin’s bow to strike the snowy ground, mere millimeters from the Demoness’s toes. “A Siren,” Ziralin spat in distaste. “If she had gotten that man in the water she would have drowned and eaten him.” The Siren’s face was beautiful, nearly angelic with long black hair, full pouty lips, and bright blue eyes that were almost hypnotic. She wore no clothing and she had a near-perfect hourglass figure with large breasts and wide hips, but from the hips down her legs were covered in blue-black scales. Her legs weren’t the only strange thing about her either, at first I thought that she had a bird’s wings instead of arms, but as we got closer I could see that they were some kind of large scaly fins with clawed talons at the ends.

She shrieked in rage, displaying a mouth full of needle-like teeth but instead of attacking us she turned and made a break for the water. Before she had gotten knee-deep I had cast my next spell, freezing the water around her solid and stopping her in her tracks. “I have a question for you Demon,” I said, putting as much venom into my voice as I could muster.

She turned her head to sneer at us. “I will tell you nothing. I have nothing to say to Faerie filth and Celestial scum.”

“Are you sure about that? My friend here can be very convincing,” Ziralin suggested threateningly.

“You’re going to kill me whether I answer or not,” the Siren hissed angrily.

Elsaishe shrugged. “You kill and eat men and you’re part of a Demon invasion force, if we let you live and stay in our world then every death at your hands after that is on us. So yeah, we have to take you down one way or another.”

I thought about the platinum hand flowers underneath my gloves, I could probably get her to talk with those. No, she wouldn’t talk, she’d scream and probably wouldn’t give me an honest answer anyway. And when it came right down to it I didn’t think I could condone torture, even with a Demon, that would just be sinking to their level and we were better than that. Instead, I gathered my magick, focused my willpower on her and how she was going to tell me the truth, and then I released the magick and let the spell fly. “Just one question, if you answer it then maybe I can send you back to Heil instead of killing you. Where is Khinara?”

The Siren laughed. “You’re looking for Khinara? She will end you, and all of your friends. She’s the most powerful Demon in Heil except for the Demon King himself. I wish that I did know where she was, if only to hasten your demise.”

“You have no idea where she is?” I pressed.

“No, but wherever she is I’m sure she’ll be pleased when she finds out that I killed you!” She turned toward me as best she could with her legs trapped in the ice and flicked her wing-like appendages, causing several small objects to fly toward me. Ziralin dove to knock me aside, narrowly avoiding both of us being impaled by the spikes. It was as she knocked me to the ground that I heard the *pfft* of Ellie’s paintball pistol being fired and the Siren’s final scream before she turned to ash.

“Are you okay?” Ziralin asked from atop me looking down in concern and breathing heavily.

“Yeah, you knocked me out of the way in time, what the hell was that?” I replied breathily, my heart racing.

“Toxic spines, deadly to humans,” she answered, kissing me tenderly before standing and offering a hand to help me up. “Apparently, Torphael has fought Sirens before. I saw her fins flexing and I knew what was coming.”

‘Thanks, both of you. Your Fae reflexes saved my ass,” I said with a sigh as I let my girlfriend help me to my feet and looked to where the Siren had stood a moment before. “I guess we’re not getting anything out of her, maybe we’ll get more out of our next target.”

“Sorry Cuz,” Elsaishe said sheepishly. “She tried to kill you and she didn’t know anything.”

“You don’t need to apologize, Ellie, you did what needed to be done. She was of no more use to us and if I had sent her back to Heil, she probably would have caused more trouble for us later. Thanks for having my back.”

“So what do we do about this guy?” Ziralin asked, nodding toward the parka-clad man lying in the snow.

“He didn’t see anything, and even if he did he probably wouldn’t remember it, so let’s get hidden in the trees over there, and then I’ll wake him.” We gathered our gear and hid in some brush and, once I had used a spell to smooth out the snow and erase any signs of our battle or our presence, I released him from my sleep spell. It took a few minutes before he stirred, but after looking around in confusion and trying to get his bearings he got to his feet and then he was back on the trail that he had come from.

We waited a good ten minutes to be sure that he was gone before emerging from our cover. I took a deep relieved breath and as we were heading back down the trail ourselves I muttered, “One down, one to go. Hopefully, we’ll have better luck at the university.”