And deep inside her, she knew. Ignoring the fact that she was about to commit a temporal anomaly that would make Carl Sagan’s head explode were he still alive, Lina closed her eyes as the three women surrounded them.
Memory and vision merged as one. “Put your hands on the tablet,” she said to her men. She felt them do it. She laid her own hands on top of theirs, the blued image of the tablet of her vision fixed in her mind.
“Goddess within, Goddess without,” she chanted. “Goddess above, Goddess below. I summon Baba Yaga, Brighde, and Cailleach, hear our plea.” Her hands tingled. She imagined channeling the energies from the Universe down through the sky, through the three women now circling them, through the hands of her men, her energy merging and mixing with theirs, down into the tablet. “The power of three, past, present, and hence. The powers of these three, and evil banish hence. With every drop of blood that I pour into the ground, may the Goddess of all take heed to this sound. As strong as this stone, unbreakable cast, this spell guarantees our strength o’er evil, long may it last.”
She felt the wind pick up around them but didn’t open her eyes. She knew the three incarnations still circled them, feeding their called-upon powers into the stone.
Lina’s voice grew stronger, surer, more confident. “Goddess above, Goddess of all. We take now their evil and banish it all. The evil they sowed, the results shall they reap. We so do will it, so shall mote it be.”
White-hot lightning impaled her from the crown of her head, through her arms, into the stone. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but the negative-light image of the tablet from her vision. Then, like that, the feeling disappeared. Her body went limp as she collapsed backward onto the grass.
She heard the anxious cries of her men as they crowded around her. When she finally could open her eyes again, she saw the three of them were once again alone in the center of the clearing. The plain stone tablet now bore the same markings from her vision.
Lina didn’t stop to consider the ramifications. Her body felt like it would explode, sizzling nerve endings on fire in a good way. She grabbed Stribog and planted a kiss on him. Startled at first, it only took him a moment to return the kiss as Svarog nibbled on the back of her neck. “Take me, now!” she gasped. “Both of you! I must have you both!”
She struggled to remove the tunic she wore. Finally, the two men helped her out of it and quickly shed their own clothes. There beside the spring, she pushed Svarog onto his back and fiercely kissed him. She barely had time to think about how they even tasted and smelled the way they did in the present before she shoved rational thought out of the way.
With her pussy already drenched with her own juices, she impaled herself on Svarog, moaning as his hot cock drove deep inside her. She rode him only for a moment before Stribog grabbed her hips and forced her to relinquish his brother’s cock. “Wait for me,” he said, driving his cool shaft deep into her pussy and making her moan. He only thrust a couple of times, enough to coat his cock in her juices before he withdrew.
Using a finger, he scooped her moisture onto her rim, getting her wet there before allowing her to once again ride Svarog’s cock.
Stribog gently entered, stopping as she adjusted to his size. In this way, it didn’t feel like it did in the present. She frequently took her men in the ass and loved the feel of anal sex.
With both of them inside her, Lina closed her eyes, threw her head back, and howled at the sky as she fucked them hard and fast, her body out of control and her mind teetering on the edge of madness. The electricity inside her flowed between her pussy and her men, back and forth, to her nipples, to her fingertips.
As her orgasm swept over her, she cried out to the Goddess, the men’s groans of pleasure as their cocks emptied inside her sending her into a new plateau of release she didn’t know if she could survive.
The burst of energy now gone, she collapsed onto Svarog and blackness took her.
Lina extricated herself from the men and pulled on the old-fashioned tunic. At first confused with the laces, she finally figured out how to make herself presentable. She had to deliver the tablet.
Now.
She kissed her men. Svarog stirred and tried to stand, but she stopped him. “You cannot follow me. Meet me back at the castle.” She grabbed the tablet and ran for the horses, fumbling a little as she mounted without dropping the bulky stone. Then she raced through the woods toward the only person she knew she could trust as much as Zachary and her men.
Her old nursemaid, Trammel.
Lina smiled, a near-hysterical laugh escaping her…
And she opened her eyes to find herself sitting in the middle of her bed at their house in modern-day Florida. “Amma,” she whispered. That’s what she’d called her nurse when she was a young child, because she couldn’t say “Trammel.”
Lina flopped back on the bed, laughing and crying at the same time. The old woman hadn’t let her down. She’d been barely able to walk, but she quickly packed a small satchel while Lina had rigged up a saddlebag to hold the tablet. Then, with some tearful laughter between them, Lina had forcibly hoisted the woman onto her own horse.
“Take it far away, Amma,” she’d said. “To lair of wolf, or flagyer of dragon, or den of bear, it matters not. But keep it safe and deliver it into the hands only of someone trustworthy. If it falls into the hands of the cockatrice, we are all lost.”
“Aye, you can count on me, Goddess.”
Lina had watched the woman ride off into the woods before she herself turned and hurried, on foot, through the woods and back to the castle.
And then by late the next morning…
She sighed.
The next day, they had defeated the cockatrice. And all four of them were dead.
But how the hell had an illustration of the Tablet of Trammel ended up in a hellacious book belonging to the cockatrice?
Chapter Fourteen
Lina walked back downstairs. The men immediately stopped talking as soon as she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Oh, quit doing that, would you?” She grabbed her coffee mug and took it over to refill it.
“Sorry,” Zack said. “Force of habit. Well?”
She waited until she’d refilled her mug and got a sip of coffee before answering. “How old is that book?” She tipped her head toward the table, where the ancient spell book lay.
Zack shrugged. “I don’t know. At least four hundred years old, but there are newer notes in there, written in ballpoint pen. Why?”
“They had the book with them when they killed your parents, Kael.”
He grimly nodded. “I suspected that.”
“And that picture,” she pointed, “was from my vision.”
“Yeah? So?” Zack asked.
“I know how the tablet was created. I know when it was created. I also know how it was sent away to safety before the battle. The cockatrice got that part of their story wrong.” From the change of expression on Zack’s face, she knew she didn’t have to explain which battle.
It still didn’t answer all his questions. “But I don’t know anything about the tablet.”
“Who was Trammel?” she asked him.
He thought for a moment while Jan, Rick, and Kael silently looked back and forth between them during the exchange. Confused, they wisely chose to keep their mouths shut.
He finally came up with it. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “But I thought she died before the battle?”
“A lot of people did. She was old enough to be dead. She lived outside the town. And the morning before we all…” She couldn’t say it. “Before the battle. I called upon Baba Yaga, Cailleach, and Brighde to help us overcome the cockatrice.”