For one timeless, perfectly balanced moment, we held our own. But the golden light grew steadily more intense, gaining in power and fury, while our circle of four grew weak.
Liesel collapsed. I saw it in my peripheral vision; my attention was riveted across the circle, half-blinded by the vortex, locked on Julian’s face. A growl from my left was Robert, hanging on only through sheer goddamned fury. The power he drew from the air blended with his own, streaming into me, merging with the energy I pulled and then flying to Julian, in a never-ending and doomed attempt to hold him.
We weren’t enough.
The light flared. Robert crumpled. I heard a cry from my own lips, overlaid by an inhuman scream, and then everything disappeared in a blaze of golden light.
Chapter Five
“Kimberly?”
My name. I was surprised I recognized it at all. If only my skull would split in half; maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much then.
“Kimberly, can you hear me?”
Opening my eyes was a mistake. Light stabbed through to the back of my head and made me wish for the lesser pain of a moment ago. I tried a second time, more judiciously, and at last managed to see.
For a moment I thought I was staring into a mirror. But the cornflower-blue eyes receded, and it was only my mother.
Wait—my mother?
The sudden thought drove me to try and sit up, which was as big of a mistake as opening my eyes had been. My mother hastily pressed me down, making the idiot noises of reassurance people use with sick patients. Sick … I must be in a hospital. That would explain the antiseptic tang in the back of my throat.
What was I doing in a hospital?
Julian.
I made it upright this time, and almost passed out again. Vision disappeared in a wave of dizziness. My mother’s hands were on my shoulders, and then my father was there, a soothing, blue-green presence that brought me back to reality.
“Kimberly, you mustn’t try to move,” he said. Now I could see again, and I looked up at him blearily. He was using his doctor voice: kind, but impersonal. “You’re suffering from backlash, and the effect’s spilling over into your vision. But it’s all temporary damage.” He got me to lie down again, though I was half-heartedly trying to resist. “We’re keeping the lights dim, and there are heavy shields on you to protect you from more shock, but you’ll continue to suffer dizzy spells and weakness for a while.” The lights were dim? So they were. Even so, they hurt. “The best thing for you will be to rest.”
“Liesel? Robert?” The names came out thickly. Damn my father; he was “encouraging” me to go to sleep. I tried to fight it off, but I was no match for a healer like him.
“Sleeping,” he said. “As you should be.”
I wanted to argue, but the words never made it past my lips before I slipped away.
~
I thought the lights had been raised some when I next woke up, but it was hard to be sure. They hurt my eyes less, though, and that was something.
Remembering my father’s advice, I didn’t try to sit up. But an attempt to rub my eyes left me staring blankly at my hands, which were swathed in bandages, and aching to the bone.
A soft step sounded near my head, and I turned to see my mother.
“Kimberly—”
“Are my hands—”
“No,” she said, and sounded relieved. “They’re not burned, although I’m told it feels as though they are. Or rather, they are burned, but only psychically, and it’ll fade quickly. The bandages are there to remind you to be careful until they’re healed.”
“Psychically burned?” I had never heard of such a thing.
My mother nodded. “Your father said it was as if your hands had been in a magical fire.”
Fire. The vortex of light. I stiffened and closed my eyes.
Eyelids were a pathetic defense against my mother. “Do you want to tell me what happened, Kimberly?”
From another woman the tone might have been sympathetic, caring. Not that my mother didn’t care about me; she did. But she was also relentless when she set her mind on something, and right now, she wanted to know what stunts her only surviving child had been up to.
“I’m not sure,” I whispered, and was aghast at my own lie. Well, not completely a lie; I didn’t know what had happened. I did remember what we’d been doing—but I wasn’t going to tell her.
I couldn’t articulate why. It was partly the thought of Noah, dying of psi-sickness in a hospital, and partly the desire of any college student to keep a parent from meddling in her life. But that wasn’t all, not by a long shot.
Mostly it was how she’d react if she knew I’d landed myself in the hospital trying to help a wilder.
“You don’t remember?”
There was more than a bit of acid in that question. I ignored it. “Liesel? Robert? Where are they?”
“Here, in similar condition,” she said.
I was only half-attending to her answer. I hadn’t acknowledged it, but my subconscious knew what I hadn’t yet admitted to myself: Julian was gone. I hadn’t even thought to ask after him. My memory of those last few minutes was chaotic, but I knew, without asking, that whatever had been in that circle had gotten Julian.
“Kimberly, there are people who can help you remember—”
“Please. Don’t,” I whispered, closing my eyes. A tear leaked out from under one lid. I didn’t want to think about it, not now. Not yet.
Julian was gone.
“All right,” my mother said, but there was steel in her voice. “You’ll have to speak to the Dean eventually, though, and she may require you to remember.”
I didn’t answer. Finally my mother left. And then I lay there, my eyes squeezed shut, trying to silence the guilt that whispered, you weren’t prepared.
~
They interviewed us together, which was a miscalculation. Alone, I would have been an easy target. But Robert, Liesel, and I were summoned before the Dean and her flunkies as a group, and that gave us strength.
“Would you like to explain what you’ve been up to?” Dean Seong asked us, in a tone that made the question into a command.
“We were trying to help our friend, ma’am,” Liesel said.
Her seelie response didn’t go over well. “Help him? By causing his disappearance—again—and flattening a ten-meter area of forest to the ground?”
“That wasn’t our intention,” I said stiffly. “We were looking for something to explain his first disappearance, since Julian himself didn’t remember anything.”
“Julian Fiain, yes. From your own words, and from the magical signatures we picked up at the site, he was with you when this mess began. The four of you are responsible for the destruction of university property and the endangerment of other people’s lives. The residues—what can be read of them—tell us you worked a summoning on university property, without the requisite training, supervision, or authorization.”
“Not true,” Robert countered. “Julian led our circle. As a wilder, he is more than qualified to conduct a summoning. He is also permitted to draft whatever assistance he deems necessary to aid him.”
I stared at Robert, then jerked my attention forward. Liesel shifted next to me, and I decided she hadn’t known any more of that last bit than I had. Was Robert serious?
The Dean behaved as though he was. “Perhaps. But Julian Fiain waived most of those rights when he applied to this university. He hasn’t taken active duty as a Guardian, and so he’s treated like any other student here.”
“You know as well as I do, Dean Seong, that the concept of ‘active duty’ is meaningless to wilders.”
She glared at him. Seong was by no means a stupid woman, but it was entirely possible that Robert was as intelligent as she was, and a good deal more stubborn. Dealing with him must be hell. I hadn’t considered the problem of permits, but Julian must have had something, or the University Ring would have stopped us before we got anywhere.
“We’re suspending
judgment until this matter has been more thoroughly investigated,” the Dean said coldly. “Until then, you’re to consider yourselves on probation. Do not speak of these matters to anyone except myself or other university staff.” She paused to fix her gaze on Robert. “And do not cause trouble again.”
As we left, I wondered what the odds of that were.
~
My textbook flew across the room and smacked satisfyingly into the wall before falling onto the chair. I glared after it, breathing hard. “Gods damn it.”
It was appalling. Julian was gone—to where, no one knew—and yet the day-to-day mundanity of life plodded on. I still had class. Professors still assigned homework. What did it matter that Domenico was firmly in the camp of those who believed the swords in the Tarot deck should be associated only with air, when I thought they had a secondary resonance with fire? And yet it did matter, because I had to make a convincing argument for my case. My life had been turned upside down, but I still had to pass Elemental Correspondences.
At least my parents were gone. They were both needed too much back home to leave their jobs for long. I loved my parents dearly, but right now, I didn’t want to face them and their questions.
Questions. I had too many, and no answers. Divination was only helpful when you didn’t need it; at times like this, when you needed it desperately, it was useless. The future was unreadable. Julian’s location was unknown. I scryed for him, and found myself staring into mist.
Hidden enemies. Sudden and catastrophic change. If I’d pushed myself harder, read the clues better, could I have prevented this?
My hands skittered restlessly over my desk, picking up objects and dropping them, not making a dent in the clutter. The room was a mess; Liesel and I hadn’t cleaned since before Samhain. I found myself leafing through one of my textbooks for Necrodivination, and tossed it away with a strangled curse. Julian wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be.
What I wanted to do was take over a sorcery lab in Adler and build a golem to find him. Never mind that I lacked the first clue how to do that. Besides, the university had no doubt tried it already. Where Julian was, no construct could follow.
Instead, I began to pick up the room.
The mundanity of the task steadied me. I turned off my brain and let my hands lead the way, shuffling chaos into order, filing review notes left over from Historical Tarot, sorting my sketches for this term’s lecture on Ring Structure. That made me think of my mother, and I put them down hastily. I tossed clothes into the hamper to be washed. More books were on the floor than on the shelves; I shoved them back where they belonged. The trash can bulged with empty pretzel bags and gum wrappers. The room began to emerge from beneath the mess.
Liesel walked in on me two-thirds of the way through, and stood observing my activity. “Enjoying yourself?”
“It needed to be done,” I said, dumping an armload of bottles into the recycling bin.
“And it saves you from having to address certain things.”
Hanging up my coat, I glared at her.
“Kim, you should go talk to Robert.”
“Why?” I slammed a desk drawer shut. “What could we possibly say to each other?”
Liesel stacked her books on her own desk, all neatly aligned. “He feels guilty.”
“So do I.”
“Exactly. It would be good for the two of you to talk, get some of this out in the air. Lord and Lady know we can’t talk to anyone else, after what the Dean said.”
We flattened a sizeable chunk of forest and they told us to keep it quiet. Our administration was wonderful. “I don’t need to talk to him.”
“Yes, you do. Otherwise you’ll never get over this.”
“Why should I?” Liesel flinched when I rounded on her viciously. “I was party to—no. I came up with a stupid idea that’s caused Julian to vanish. That may have cost him his life. Why should I ‘get over it’?” She looked as though she was going to answer that, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Don’t you dare go all seelie on me. Pointless guilt is wrong, and I won’t argue that. But I am responsible. And I don’t want to forget it.”
She just stood there, sad-eyed. I almost dropped my shields and rammed my emotions right up in her face, forcing them on her so she’d feel them into next week. Such an act would have been unconscionable.
Instead I grabbed my coat and gloves, and left before I could do something I’d regret.
~
The stacks of Talman were even less cheery than usual. Very little light came in through the windows, and the ceiling lights were lethargic and flickering. The snow blanketing the ground outside muffled all noise. There was no one on the entire floor, and my skin crawled at every tiny sound.
I flitted from section to section, glaring at rows of books that couldn’t help me find my friend. I found books on golems, but not advanced ones, and they were incomprehensible to me anyway. I walked through the divination section twice. Nothing suggested itself as a solution.
I stopped in the middle of one aisle, where I had not bothered to turn on the light, and stared sightlessly ahead. The silence around me pressed in.
“Damn it,” I said distinctly, and listened to the words be swallowed up by the books.
This was accomplishing nothing. I headed downstairs into the Dungeon.
The main reading room of Talman was quite possibly the one place on earth most uniquely unsuited to inspiring productive effort in students. It was as dim as the stacks, and nearly as claustrophobic. The chairs at the tables were hard and unforgiving; those at the study carrels, replaced three years ago, were already sagging and lumpy. Its low ceiling and insufficient light made it seem like the room was constantly closing in on the unwary fool stupid enough to wander within its reach. Officially the Helen W. Edelman Reading Room, the Dungeon was a marvel of bad planning and worse execution.
Which made it perfect for my current mood.
Bad planning and worse execution; that summed up my recent antics quite well. But whereas the misadventures of the architect had merely resulted in a depressing and uncomfortable room, mine had backfired on one of my dearest friends. We hadn’t stopped to think, any of us.
The back of the Dungeon held machines dispensing soda, potato chips, and every revoltingly sugary concoction an overworked and underslept student could wish for when finishing his psychology paper at four o’clock in the morning. Since I wasn’t minded to drown my misery in alcohol, poisoning myself with the most disgusting food I could find seemed a bizarrely appealing alternative.
The machines were wedged into the room’s dimmest, gloomiest corner. Which explained why I didn’t see the figure slumped in a chair until it spoke.
“Who goes there?”
I screamed.
Had I been anything like rational, the ridiculous phrasing of that question would have told me who the speaker was without looking. Then again, had I been rational, I would’ve seen Robert before he roused from his stupor enough to ask it.
Instead, I screamed. He barely reacted, remaining apathetically collapsed in the clutching embrace of the sagging armchair. He was glaring at me malevolently, I saw, once I was calm enough to look—glaring with the expression of one facing the last person in the world he wants to see.
I sympathized. I didn’t want to talk to Robert any more than he wanted to talk to me.
But fate and the gods seemed to have other ideas. And now, having found him, I couldn’t make myself turn and walk away. I didn’t know what it was. His appearance, maybe. Robert looked hung over, horrendously so, although I doubted he’d been drinking. His eyes were so bloodshot the blue irises jumped out unnaturally at me, and his slack posture, sprawling in the chair, broadcast the apathy of one who can’t muster the energy or conviction to behave like a living human being.
“You look like hell,” I said, and complimented myself on that diplomatic opening.
“‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’” He muttered the quote bitterly.
I
sat down gingerly on one of the other chairs, perching on its edge rather than allowing it to trap me in the pit of its sloping cushion. Robert stared at me dully, not seeming to care whether I stayed or left.
“Liesel thinks we ought to talk,” I said at last.
That provoked a short laugh from him. “Concerning what?”
Julian, obviously. But I would take my own approach, not the one my roommate wanted. “What happened?”
Robert looked away, leaning his head against the chair’s stained back. “You were there.”
“Yes, and I know what I saw. But I don’t know what you saw.”
“What good will it do?”
I considered and discarded several replies before saying honestly, “I’m not sure. But it has to be better than sitting here and doing nothing.”
He examined that and found it acceptable. “Something got him. It took him away.”
“Yes, but what? That’s the real question. Start with the beginning of the ritual, and go from there.”
Robert’s eyes fixed on the ceiling, and he spoke in a flat monotone. “We consecrated the ground and set the shields, raising them on everyone. Then we shielded the inner circle. Julian began the summoning. The green light appeared, and it seemed to me that Julian recognized it. There was an explosion, and the light turned gold. Whereupon it commenced trying to suck him in. We grew weaker; it grew stronger. Liesel went down. Then I passed out.”
I myself was staring at the floor, as though the answers were to be found in the stained carpet. And maybe they were, or at least inspiration was. “It grew stronger. I felt that, too. Was it feeding off us—stealing our power?”
That interested Robert enough to make him lift his head and look at me. “I think not,” he said slowly. “We held our own for a while. But then it gained in strength, and so we began to weaken more rapidly.”
“As though it had help,” I murmured. “It—or they? More than one?”
“I hope so,” Robert said. “Any creature that can outmatch three high bloods and a wilder … frightens me.”
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