“Pritkin! Get out of here!” I yelled, the need for subtlety over. I received no reply. I really hoped that, for once, he’d been sensible and retreated. He was at a serious disadvantage otherwise. He couldn’t hit Richardson hard enough to risk rupturing his shields and killing us both, but the mage could attack him with impunity.
Make that mages. A flicker of movement caught my eye and I glanced behind us to see a dozen or more ripples in the energy stream, like sharks slicing through water. And off to the left, something dark appeared against all that jumping color. I deliberately didn’t look directly at it in case I tipped Richardson off. He didn’t see it, but apparently one of the mages following us did. A bolt of energy—red instead of blue—flashed past to explode against Pritkin’s shields.
“No!” Richardson yelled. “Not inside the line!”
Nobody paid him any attention. Two more bursts screamed by us moments later, barely missing Pritkin, who dodged out of the way at the last second. Leaving the spells to burst against the river of power below.
I didn’t see what they did—we were moving too fast and were almost immediately beyond them—but I felt it. The line trembled and wavered all around us, and energy bands that a moment before had been straight and more or less steady were suddenly arcing across our path. The already dangerous flow of the ley line became a raging torrent, tossing us around like a speck of dust in a cyclone. Lightning or something equally energetic sparked off the mage’s shields as we spun, rolled and bobbed uncontrollably, swimming on wild currents of power.
I caught a glimpse of Pritkin barely avoiding being speared by a tower of blue flame. But he ducked under a fiery arch the size of a house and it surged past him. We weren’t so lucky. Richardson swerved to avoid a stuttering mass that had erupted right in front of us and ran straight into another one hard enough that the impact reverberated through my bones.
Glowing streaks and odd swirls of light curled all around us. For a moment, all I could see were bursts of power exploding everywhere, burning through our bubble of protection like acid, before the mage made a sudden, violent motion and tore us free. The current tossed us to the side of the line, where a thick band of power threw us back once more, straight into the path of the granddaddy of all fissures.
It covered half the line’s width in a towering column of angry blue fire. A tidal wave of prickling energy rushed over me as we breached the outer skin, and then it flared into a blinding brightness. I couldn’t see anything, blue-white light filling my vision and my brain, overwhelming and unbearable.
My eyes slowly adjusted to show me the inside of the flare. Power pulsed everywhere in glowing blue-white streams that sheared chunks off Richardson’s remaining shields every couple of seconds. They couldn’t last at this rate—and as soon as they were gone, so were we.
Richardson must have had the same thought, because he started prying my arms off his waist. “I regret that there will not be a trial,” he said as I struggled and fought. “I looked forward to hearing you beg for your life.”
My fists bunched in his suit coat, trying to hold on, but he tore them loose and got his hands around my wrists. “Please! You can’t do this!” I screamed, my eyes on the leaping wall of fire outside.
“I suppose that will have to do,” he said regretfully. And with a brutal shove, he sent me flying backward, straight into the heart of the flame.
Chapter Six
My scream lodged in my throat as reality whited out and I was consumed by a pain so pure that it took over everything: my body, my thoughts, even my name. I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to choke me, but I couldn’t even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, do
something
, but if I still had a hand it didn’t connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead.
And then it was over.
The pain was gone between one breath and the next, leaving me shaken and very, very confused. I gasped in air and it tasted wrong, sharp and bitter, but I could breathe. My head was spinning, my nerves were stuttering like a junkie’s and I could feel my heart in my fingertips. But it didn’t feel like my muscles were ripping themselves loose from my bones any longer, which I counted as a plus.
I risked opening my eyes and looked down in disbelief at my unmarked hands, at my body that for some reason was not being incinerated. But once my eyes adjusted to the intense light inside the flare, I didn’t have to wonder why. A familiar golden haze surrounded me on all sides, pushing against the jumping blue field, keeping it back.
The field was in the shape of Agnes’ stolen ward, the one passed onto me by my mother before she died. It was given only to the Pythias or their heirs, and it was designed to be powered by the collective energy of the Circle. That wasn’t true anymore—they’d cut me off as soon as they realized that it might interfere with their plans for my early retirement—but a friend had managed to fix it. He’d set it to draw from the only other power source of that magnitude available: that of my office.
It was the same pool of power that should let me shift out of here, if the null net had stopped working. I tried to access it again but went nowhere. Yet the ward burned brighter than I’d ever seen it, with an almost blinding golden light. I decided I didn’t much care about the reason right now—I was just grateful for it.
Especially considering what the fissure was doing to Richardson’s shields.
The column of pure energy tore through his remaining protection like it wasn’t even there. For an instant the light haloed him, with every eyelash, every seam on the tailored suit, every ghostly freckle on the bridge of his nose clearly visible. He screamed, eyes opened blind and dilated, mouth wide and soundless, as light spilled through him, bright enough to give me a glimpse of dark bone inside incandescent flesh.
Then he was gone, with nothing to show that he’d been there but a few ashes that the current snatched away.
Even when I squeezed my eyes shut, the image was there, burnt in white-hot light behind my eyelids. My stomach rebelled and bile burned my throat. I pressed my arms over my stomach and waited for the same thing to happen to me, for my ward to fail, for the end. Then something hit me, sending me spinning off into the main current of the stream, jolting me back into myself, to the reality of
get out
,
get out now
!
Only I wasn’t sure how.
I had a little experience with ley lines, but this no longer looked much like one. The thick bands of power that usually stayed along the outer edges were fraying, shooting electric tendrils from one side of the line to the other. Twisting surges of deadly blue fire—some as thick as a large tree trunk, others no wider than my finger—crisscrossed the corridor, forcing me to throw myself first to one side and then the other in a deadly game of dodgeball that I was sure to lose.
It was the smaller surges that were the most deadly, jittering here and there so quickly that they were almost impossible to avoid. They turned the previously stable corridor into a leaping, burning mass of flame, spotted by dark specks where the war mages’ bodies blocked out the light. One shimmering band hit a mage who had almost caught up with me, exploding his protective shell and sending the blazing body straight at me.
He struck my ward like a bird hitting the windshield of a speeding car and exploded—there was no other word for it. The smell of burnt meat reached me, drowning out the harsh tang of the ley line’s air as flaming pieces of his body tumbled past. I screamed as the force of the movement pushed me once more toward the edge of the line. But unlike before, I didn’t bounce back. The outer bands of power had unraveled too much, and this time nothing caught me.
Electric blue dissolved into darkness as my body was thrown clear. I had a brief glimpse of a sky like a bruise: blue/black, septic yellow and festering, angry green. And then I was falling toward the ground hundreds of feet below.
I dropped like a stone and landed with a jolt. Despite the ward, my head hit brutally hard, thumping against dirt as rigid as concrete, causing my ribs to howl in protest. For a second, everything went white and ringing. I lay there, gasping, trying to get air back in my lungs but they didn’t seem in the mood to cooperate. I finally managed to suck in some oxygen and used it to groan.
Shudders ran through me at odd intervals, mimicking the electric pulses of the line, while my stomach informed me that, yes, it was possible to be motion sick even while lying totally still on the ground. Opening my eyes sounded like a bad idea, as I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing what the mages had planned for an encore. But not seeing was even worse.
I looked up and lay there transfixed, unable to do anything but stare at the sight of a blue gash spanning half the length of the sky. It spewed bursts of power like sun flares in every direction, shedding embers like transient stars. Some hit the ground, scorching the sand and setting the nearby scrub brush on fire.
It looked like we’d left Vegas behind and were somewhere in the desert. But that was the only good thing. You weren’t supposed to be able to see ley lines—they didn’t exist in our world, or any other. They were the metaphysical borderlines, the buffer zones between realms. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what would happen if one of them ruptured and two worlds came into direct contact.
Why didn’t I think it would be good?
A raw wind pushed at me, tossing my hair around, while my stomach kept doing slow rolls. I got to my knees, gagging on the electric air, trying to scan the area for any sign that Pritkin had made it out. But my vision kept blurring. Or maybe that was the ripples, like waves, that were flowing over the sand, flooding the desert like underwater light. Everything seemed to move, but nothing was him.
“Pritkin!”
I didn’t need to yell—the communication spell could pick up even a whisper—but I did it anyway. It was hard to hear anything with the wind screaming around me as the sky writhed and shredded. I stared upward until my eyes watered from the strain, and I yelled again at intervals, but there was no response.
Maybe the spell had failed, I thought desperately. Maybe that’s all it was, some minor glitch. Or possibly whatever was happening to the line was throwing up interference that he couldn’t break through. That had to be it, because Pritkin was virtually indestructible. And because I didn’t think I could take it if it was something worse.
My tried-and-true philosophy of keeping people at a distance was taking a beating lately. It wasn’t working so well with Mircea, and Pritkin had somehow bulldozed past every defense I had before I’d even noticed. I still wasn’t sure how he’d done it.
He wasn’t that good-looking, he had the social skills of a wet cat and the patience of a caffeinated hummingbird. In between crazy stunts and, okay, saving my life, he was just really annoying. When we’d started working together, I’d assumed it would be a question of
putting up
with Pritkin; then suddenly the stupid hair was making me smile, and the sporadic heroics were making my heart jump and the constant bitching had me wanting to kiss him quiet. And now I cared more than was good for me.
So, of course, he was gone.
“Pritkin!” I screamed it again, my eyes searching the widening gap above me, but there were no little dark specks that might be my partner bailing out. Had he seen me leave? Or was he still searching? No, that couldn’t be it. That would be crazy and reckless and stupid.
And very Pritkin.
“—is ruptur . . . now!” The garbled phrase was loud enough to make me jump and to practically crack my eardrum—and I’d never been so happy to hear anything in my life.
“I’m already out! Stop looking for me!” I yelled, but the wind blew half my words away.
“Are you . . . right? Can you . . . before—”
“Stop talking! Why are you still talking? Bail out, damn it!” “—the ground. Stay—”
“Shut up! Stop giving me orders and
get the hell out of there
!”
I didn’t hear his answer, if he gave one, because the sky exploded. Blue lightning had been threading through the seething clouds, and now a huge branch arced downward, hitting a nearby hill with enough force to blow sand half a mile high. I hunched down with my arms over my head, trying to protect myself from the resulting hail of rocks and debris. And a hand descended on my shoulder.
I turned, grateful and furious, a few appropriate comments trembling on my lips—and looked into the face of a stranger. He was tall with spiky black hair and startled hazel eyes. It looked like someone bailed out early, I thought. And then my ward flared, throwing him back a dozen yards.
I watched his body arch pale and limp against the night, and then I turned and ran in the other direction. A flash of lightning hit nearby, with a thunderclap that threw me blind and rolling across the ground. I stumbled and almost fell down the side of the hill, stunned and furious. I was sick of having to dodge the people who should have been my allies while I fought my enemies and theirs. And where the hell was Pritkin?
The residual static in the air had the hair on my arms standing up as I scrambled back to my feet. I glanced back at the mage, but he didn’t look too dangerous at the moment. His body lay in the weird, contorted position he’d landed in, sprawled across the dirt like a broken doll. I paused, my heart pounding wildly, flight reflex kicking in, sweat springing to the surface of my skin.
Normally, I wouldn’t have wasted any sympathy—my ward doesn’t flare unless there is a serious threat. That and the fact that he was with the guys who’d just tried to kill me was all the incentive I needed to get out of there. Except I couldn’t. Because he’d landed facedown in a pile of loose sand deep enough to suffocate him.
The wind wrestled with my hair while I struggled with the life-or-death decision that had been dumped on me. I didn’t have Pritkin’s knowledge of magic. My only real defenses were my ward and my ability to shift, and neither was inexhaustible. Letting him suffocate might be the only sure way to stop him from dragging me off to a swift trial and a certain death.