Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5) (31 page)

I looked at the ring now on my left hand … Then realized, as I faced myself, that the ring on Beneath-magic Janet was on the right hand, as though I looked at my own reflection.

Reflections …
 

Emmett’s magic could split people into their essential parts, each an image of the other—if not exact in the case of the dragons. He wanted a magic mirror to enhance his abilities, doubling his power, or perhaps multiplying it infinite times. A mirror reflecting a mirror showed a never-ending corridor of possibilities.

Mirrors also showed what was truly there. My mirror had shoved me into the dreamwalking to explain to me what was truth, and what I had to face.

Emmett had broken the mirror when he’d come out of it. Because it had revealed his true self? The skin sunken into the skull, the eyes points of light?

Emmett had become that being by siphoning off power from mage after mage, stealing magic until he’d exhausted his mortal body. He had to keep up a glam in order to interact with the world. No client would have wanted to come to his sleek office building to entrust their money to him if they’d seen his real guise.

He’d made sure the glam was in place when he emerged from the mirror, because even he didn’t want to face the mirror and see the truth.

Reflections,
I mused, even as the dark part of my brain screamed in pain.
Reflections of reality—in a magic mirror.

And suddenly, I knew how to use the mirror against him.

The knowledge came to me on a whisper—no idea if it was a product of my own mind, the mirror, Mick, my grandmother, Elena, Cassandra—someone else trying to help me. It didn’t matter. I knew what I needed to do.

Both of me turned and extended the hand that wore the ring. “Smooth,” we said together.
 

Lightning crackled around the hand of the Stormwalker. A ball of Beneath magic balanced in the hand of the goddess. Together we threw the magic—lightning and white fire—into the mirror.

The mirror let out a sound of nails on glass—
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The pieces of glass flowed into one another, glowing as red as the mirror had under Flora’s spell. The two Janets moved their hands, and the glass slid to the edges of the frame, polished and whole. The mirror’s scream died suddenly away into thoughtful silence.

Emmett snarled and threw a black spell our way. Beneath magic Janet laughed and danced aside. The Stormwalker broke the spell with a bolt of lightning.

“Mick!” I shouted, the two voices of me rising together. “Hold him!”

A dragon talon obligingly came down, closed around Emmett, and shoved him where I pointed—against the mirror.

He fought. Emmett drove spell after spell into Mick with the speed of a machine gun. Mick flinched and shrieked, his claw and leathery skin heating to molten red then icy white, the talon cracking and bleeding.

But Mick was made of tough stuff. He could ignore pain to focus on what he wanted with dragon intensity. Right now, he wanted Emmett against the mirror.

Cassandra was on her feet, chanting words, her fingers moving. I heard her say “Bind,” then black threads fell over Emmett like a steel net. He struggled, but the threads were strong. They bound Mick’s claw as well, but again, Mick wouldn’t care as long as he finished what he set out to do.

The net kept Emmett from breaking free of Mick, but it didn’t stop his magic. He threw a spell at Cassandra, his hand shaped into a claw, and then started to suck off
her
magic.

Cassandra determinedly chanted again, though her face lost color and she had to slump against Pamela. Even so, she went on with her spell as though resolved that she’d dose Emmett good before she went down.

I didn’t worry about her, because I knew in the end, she’d be all right.

The double me moved to Emmett, neither of us touching the ground. We stood to either side of him, hands with the rings reaching out to the mirror’s frame.

“Reflect,” we said. “See what is inside you.”

I’d never before seen Emmett terrified. Worried a few times, but never out and out scared shitless. I did now. His gray eyes widened, his pupils became pinpricks, and a few drops of blood slid from his nose.

The sight of those scarlet drops bolstered my confidence. When I’d first met Emmett he’d said that when he’d initially begun using great magics, he’d get a nosebleed from the pressure of it, which he’d since learned to handle.

He couldn’t handle it today. That meant my idea was working.
 

Beneath-magic Janet grabbed the back of his neck and slammed him against the glass. The Stormwalker eased the shard of magic mirror she always kept with her from her pocket and held it behind Emmett, angling it so that the mirror repeated back on itself.

“See,” we said.

Emmett let out a keening sound. The mirror repeated the noise, the wail rising until I thought my eardrums would burst.

The reflection of Emmett, gray-eyed, dark-suited executive shattered into two, then three, then tens, then hundreds. Those images began to change, disintegrating from Emmett into figures of people, so many people.

His victims, I realized. Every single being he’d stolen from since he’d decided to become the greatest mage in all the world.

I saw them, from simplest apprentice to adept mage like the one I’d watched him battle this summer. I saw Gabrielle, then Drake, and then Cassandra at the end of the line of victims, the last he’d siphoned from today.

The mirror showed me all. They stood, some alive and broken, some obviously dead, their shades looking back at Emmett and making me shiver.

“You reap what you sow, Emmett,” I said in my double voice. “And now today, you’ll pay.”

Mick and Cassandra still bound Emmett, so the two Janets put our hands on the mirror and slid every bit of magic we had into it.

“Return,” we said.

“No!” Emmett’s nose began to stream blood, his terror coming at me through the glass.

I held on, relentless. Magic began to pour out of Emmett as fast as the blood, diving into the mirror and then reflecting, not into the hundreds of mages as I’d supposed, but into me.

The rush of it sent me off the ground toward the peeled-back, ruined tin ceiling. I grabbed the frame of the mirror and hung on.

All the magics poured into me, beginning with what he’d managed to pull from Cassandra, Drake, and Gabrielle, to a water mage who’d gotten in his way a few days ago, to more and more mages down the years.

He’d taken from all—witches, demons, shamans, Changers, Nightwalkers, skinwalkers—every single magical person he could best, Emmett had robbed. He was the Ununculous because he’d defeated the last mage who’d called himself that, and I drew the collected magics of
that
Ununculous into me as well.

All these, plus the power of the magic mirror and the original powers of Emmett himself—fairly strong earth magic—now became part of me.

I no longer had to hold on to the mirror to use its magics. My disparate bodies floated upward then slid together and became one.

Emmett, crying, sank to the floor. Blood poured from his nose, and he weakly tried to mop it up with a wad of tissue he’d pulled from his pocket.

He was no longer the slick executive Emmett, nor was he the scary walking-dead Emmett. He was an ordinary looking man with a body running to fat, hair thinning on top, and eyes of indeterminate hazel, blinking behind thick-lensed glasses. He was more ordinary looking even than Fremont Hansen, whose kindhearted and affable personality made him well-liked and unique.

Emmett was a nobody. A man so nondescript no one noticed him, and he likely didn’t have the personality to compensate. And so he’d enhanced the magic inside him and learned to steal from others to remake himself and get back at the world.

All that magic was now inside me. I had knowledge of ages and the cosmos, of magic and chemistry, folklore and true history. It filled me, that knowledge, artistry, and skill, and made me laugh.

“So much for Emmett Smith,” I announced, while Cassandra and Pamela watched me, open-mouthed. Mick had at some point shifted back from dragon, and now he stood in the doorway of the burned-out kitchen, my delectable man of fire.

“So much for the Ununculous,” I said, carrying on my theme. I rose on a cushion of air. “He messed with the wrong mage, one with a magic mirror. Poor Emmett. Now
I
am the Ununculous.”

I put out my hand, and changed the world.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

My reach extended all the way to Magellan, and I could see the little town in my mind’s eye. It was an ordinary community in this part of the Southwest, small but close-knit, people supplementing the goods they could find at local businesses with trips to Flag or Phoenix on the weekends. The Native Americans who lived here or came here to work were comfortably close to their families in the Indian nations that surrounded the area.

I could do anything to these people, and I could do anything
for
these people.

First, I gave everyone sleeping happy dreams. I gave a young woman in the vast Medina clan who’d been debating leaving home the knowledge that she could seek her fortune in the cities and still find a place with her family in Magellan. I assured one of the Salases that asking the woman of his dreams to marry him would result in a fine life together.

I moved my knowledge into the home of Jamison Kee and Naomi Hansen, found Julie lying awake in her bedroom, and made her deafness go away. It was so easy, the manipulation of bones and nerves of the ear canal, so simple to make them work properly again. Why had no one else done this?

The magic I worked on her wasn’t like the spell Jamison had performed this summer, to fade when the magic did, but a true cure. Julie’s physiology was now the way it was supposed to be.

I withdrew as Julie sat up and gasped.

I flowed away, to the outskirts of Magellan again, found Fremont and Flora staring at each other in front of Fremont’s house, and encouraged him to kiss her.

I found Drake where Mick had stashed him on the other side of the railroad bed, and fed his dragon self back into him. I left him, gasping and astonished, and wended my way north to Flat Mesa.

In the medical center, a man who’d been rushed there by his wife after a massive heart attack would live, his heart strong and sound again. A woman with pneumonia suddenly got better, those germs dead.

I could do anything, I realized, cure anyone. I could fly around the world with Mick and never have to worry about my goddess mother and the vortexes again. In fact …

I zoomed my awareness out to the vortex, lifted another two feet of desert floor over the wash, and slammed it down. Did I hear a faint cry of anguish from the goddess below? Maybe I should open up the cracks, go down there, and finish her off entirely.

“Janet,
stop
.”

The voice was Elena’s. She was standing in the gaping hole between saloon and lobby, my grandmother and Ansel behind her.
 

I could cure Ansel as well, I realized. Take away the magic that had made him a Nightwalker, and let him rest in peace. He’d be dead and dust—he’d died all the way back in 1942—but he’d be free of his curse. Ansel seemed to sense my intent, and he backed away, his eyes wide with fear.

Elena, now. She had vast magics that reached back centuries. She could flatten this place and both towns, and she knew it. I reached out my hand to take all she had.

“Don’t even think about it,” my grandmother said in her stern tones, pointing her walking stick at me.

“You know, you never let me have any fun,” I told her.

I swept my hand in her direction, jerked the cane from her fingers, and cured her arthritis. Grandmother jumped as her pain flowed away, and her joints and limbs became supple again.

I pushed my magic past her and out again, finding Gabrielle, who was heading back toward the hotel with Colby in the minivan. I flattened my hand, refilled Gabrielle with her Beneath power, and saw her clutch her chest and cry out. The minivan swerved to the side of the highway and stopped, Colby reaching from the driver’s seat to take Gabrielle into his arms.

Now back to Elena. With her magic, and mine, and what I’d taken from Emmett, I could eliminate poverty from the native peoples, give them back their land and their world. I could punish everyone who’d ever harmed them, from the ancestors of the people who’d hurt
my
ancestors, down to their descendants.

“No,” my grandmother said. She rubbed her left arm, as though the newfound agility ached. “The world is more complicated than that. An eye for an eye sounds simple, but it causes ripples of pain that never go away.”

How she knew what I had in mind, I don’t know, but Grandmother always did.

But I could take her power, and Elena’s, and Cassandra’s, and Mick’s, and no one could stop me.

Another voice came to me, the low velvet rumble of Coyote. He sat in the parking lot, under the moonlight, his coyote face brushed with silver.
You can’t play god, Janet. That job’s already been taken.

I could steal Coyote’s power too. Then I’d truly be unstoppable.

Don’t mess with things you don’t understand,
Coyote said, a snarl in his voice.
What’s inside me would kill you instantly.

What was inside
me
could probably mitigate the difficulty, but Coyote was wise. I needed to figure out how to handle his power before I took it. Only a matter of time, though.

A sheriff’s SUV pulled in beside Coyote. I started, wondering how I hadn’t seen it coming down the road, but what emerged from it was a patch of nothing in all the amazing light and heat of the world.

How Nash could live like that I didn’t understand. It must be lonely and cold, which was why he needed the fireworks of Maya.
 

Maya was with him, bright and exuberant as she climbed out of the passenger seat, not letting Nash out of her sight. I imagined the argument about her coming with him had been strong. Colby and Gabrielle probably
had
found them boinking.

Colby himself came charging up in the van, Gabrielle slumped against him. He headed quickly to the back of the hotel, out of sight. I knew he’d take care of Gabrielle, and I shifted my focus to Nash.