Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  He caught her by the shoulders before she bounced off him. “Whoa, shorty. What’re you doing out of your cave? For that matter, what are you doing here in Medical lugging a suitcase?”

  She looked up and saw him sporting a different face today, one of his new favorites. If she hadn’t been in such a rush, she might have laughed. He was getting better at his “George Clooney” every day.

  Four or five replies passed through her thoughts, she settled on the quickest. “Bull,” she said. “And we’re on the clock.”

  His eyes narrowed further. “Bella—”

  “Knows and authorized. Brought in me and Sovie on it.” She fidgeted. “Djinni, I really am on the clock.”

  “Brought in the big guns—” he took the case from her before she could tighten her grip on it. “Explain while we move, then.”

  The hell—She almost told him to take a hike, but partly because she still was on the border about him scaring the crap out of her, and partly because…well, because…she didn’t argue. She just set off down the corridor at a trot, which his longer legs ECHOed as merely a fast walk, explaining in layman’s terms as best she could. “So that’s why. My family specializes in vamps. All kinds of vamps. So I’m the closest we’ve got to an expert.”

  “All kinds of vamps?” His brow wrinkled. “There’s more than one kind?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” She couldn’t resist adding, “Though none of them sparkle as far as I’m aware.”

  They reached the door to Bulwark’s private room. He opened it for her, and gave the relatively barren cube a good raking gaze as he closed the door behind her. “Room swept?”

  “To the best of our ability,” she told him, with emphasis. She didn’t tell him who the our was, but he was smart enough to intuit they’d had some Metis help.

  He watched her as she unpacked her kit, a mix of high-tech and antique. “Risk?”

  “High,” she told him truthfully. “But the risk is all mine and…dammit, it’s Bull we’re talking about. Bella will be here shortly as my monitor, and this time she’s got some folks on-call if things go too pear-shaped.”

  “Like?”

  “Sovie and Mary Ann.”

  Djinni rolled his eyes at the mention of Einhorn. “That’s a lot of help,” he said sarcastically. “Well hell, I’m here, you might as well use me as your anchor.”

  “Uh…what?” She turned to look at him in complete disbelief.

  “I said, you might as well use me as your anchor.” He snorted. “It’s not as if you haven’t already infected me with your magic cooties, so I’m not exactly pure anymore.”

  She was so shocked that she didn’t reply with equal sarcasm. “That…would be…amazingly helpful,” she said instead. Then, thankfully, her sarcasm returned. “Did your priest require you to do some penance or something? A hundred thousand rosaries would probably be easier.”

  He snorted. “Make with the magic, Vix.”

  Red stood aside and let Vickie begin her preparations. He assumed a relaxed posture, his arms lazily crossed as he leaned back against the wall. At first glance, one might have assumed he was bored. Laying down a square of heavy canvas, painted with a double circle and a few arcane symbols, Vickie paused and glanced up at him. His eyes betrayed him. They bore into her, watching her every move. She felt a painful flush in her cheeks as the intensity of his stare made her acutely self-conscious of everything she was doing.

  “Uh, do you want me to explain this?” she asked.

  “Just keep at it, Victrix. Time. Issue. Remember?”

  Vickie shrugged and continued to work, adding things at the corners of the square. A very heavy pillar of stone, an equally heavy copper bowl, a glass bowl with walls an inch thick that she poured a tiny amount of water into, and a cast-iron incense burner. They all looked old. Very, very old. Probably because they were very, very old. She put an LED light into the copper bowl, and a little computerized gizmo of her own design into the incense burner. Immediately a faint scent of amber filled the room. She didn’t want any real fire in here. Not with Bull on an oxygen-feed.

  The Djinni stiffened up, then let out a subtle exhalation as he composed himself. That smell, Vickie thought, groaning inwardly. She had forgotten what that smell meant to him, how it might affect him, and she cursed herself silently for that. She needed him steady, focused. Still, it couldn’t be helped. The “incense” (nothing that would compromise the breathing of Bulwark or any other patient) was necessary, and they would have to put aside any misgivings if they were to succeed. If they were to save Bulwark.

  Red had, in his usual Djinni fashion, surprised her. To say he was skittish around magic was an understatement. That he would volunteer so readily to participate in this endeavor spoke of…what? Whatever the reason, he was trying too hard, straining to look calm when he was obviously on edge. Was it worry? For Bull? Before everything went to hell, when Bull’s team had been getting solid at last, Vickie had seen them together via her high-tech Overwatch protocols, whether at work or in the quiet times between jobs. By the end, the conflict and near-insults had become banter, and the sniping had…almost seemed forced. They would argue, but like two old friends who thrived on getting almost on each other’s nerves without actually going over the edge. It had become clear to most everyone as well as to her that Bulwark and the Djinni had become friends.

  * * *

  Again, she paused and looked up at him. Red shifted his stance and looked away. She could see through it, he could tell, his bad attempt at nonchalance. He almost shook his head in dismay, but merely grunted. Despite it all, here he was again, at the heart of a storm. I’m such a putz, he thought. After everything, I promised myself never again, and here I am, voluntarily chaining myself in the eye of the tornado.

  He knew what she was doing, of course. The stone was to represent the element of Earth, the bowls for fire and water and so forth. He had seen similar things before, the last time he had participated in something like this, what he had promised to be the last time…

  He steadied himself as Vickie began to explain her set-up.

  “This is mostly old-school. Older stuff in magic has more…” She paused to consider exactly the right world. “…gravity. The more times something is repeated successfully, the more you shove the odds in your favor. I prefer to shoot from the hip and use cybermancy, but I refuse to take any chances when it comes to Bull.” She pointed at her Elemental Pillars. “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. All four objects have been in my family for five hundred years, minimum. That rock for Earth, which is my prime element, dates back to the Etruscans, we think. Those are my power-points, what I’ll use as my fuel lines while I execute the setup. They’ll also be my protections from anyone with magic trying to get at me while I’m working.”

  The door opened. “I’d prefer mystical Rottweilers for that,” said Bella, looking…odd…in doctor’s scrubs. “Djinni, what the hell are you doing here? The wall doesn’t need holding up.”

  Red didn’t look at her. He simply shrugged, and continued to watch Vickie.

  * * *

  Well, that’s a first, Bella thought. The jerk’s usually got his eyes all over me when I enter a room. Bella felt an odd pang, disquieted by Red’s lack of attention.

  “He volunteered as my anchor,” Vickie said. “Since we, uh…worked magic together, and no one else around here has, that’s a plus, but even more…” she managed a wry grin. “Well, for an anchor I need someone with a strong will, and I can’t think of anyone more pig-headed than the Djinni.”

  “Got that right,” Bella replied dryly. She flexed her fingers and cracked her knuckles, a bad habit from her paramedic days she still hadn’t broken. Then she checked to make sure her two panic-buttons were right where she could get to them quickly, gave Bulwark another once-over to make sure nothing had changed, and plopped down on a stool between him and Vickie. “So, we ready?”

  “Did most of the prep at home.” Vickie stood in the center of the circl
es painted on the canvas and looked straight into Djinni’s eyes. “Speaking of which, that is what I need from you. I’m casting everything loose in order to get deep into what’s sucking Bull dry. Best picture is, we have a whirlpool and I have to go down to the bottom to plug it. I can’t concentrate on anything but that. You have to do my concentrating for me on my lifeline. It’s easy. Just think of everything that means home to you. Doesn’t have to mean home to me, just you. It’s the home part, not whose home it is.”

  “I can do that,” Red muttered, and took a deep breath.

  * * *

  She gave him a real smile, not strained, not faked. “I know you can. You may have one of the strongest wills outside of a magician I’ve ever seen.”

  Home, he thought. Right, think of home, c’mon Red, old hat, just do it like before…NO…not like before. Vix has got this, she knows the score. Not like Justine. Just think of home, of home…

  Vickie took a deep breath. “Right. Here we go.”

  And now all that work on the parkour course showed. Her hands moved smoothly in the air as she moved in a slow, precise circle, like a tai-chi practitioner crossed with a symphony conductor, sketching lines that glowed, and stayed, weaving a web of symbols all around her until it solidified into a wall. And at that moment, she stopped moving, completely, eyes open, seeing nothing, and the four objects at the corners of the canvas began to shine; deep gold, emerald, sapphire, crimson.

  * * *

  From her perspective, she was free of that imprisoning body…but not free, for she was already caught up in the “gravity well” that was what Harmony had done to Bulwark. It was slowed, but not stopped, a black-hole in slow-motion. She could have fought the pull, but that wasn’t why she was “here.” She had to let it take her; had to fall into it. That was the only way to reach the heart of the process and cut the damned thing out.

  Because a spell is a process, and not a thing. People forgot that, or never knew it in the first place. They treated spells like concrete constructions and tried to break them. That was not how it worked. Spells were things that kept going, which is why they resisted breaking. You had to interrupt the process. Once that happened, the whole mess would tangle up and fall down, and…and if you were very, very lucky, some of it would snap back on the person who had started it, like the end of a long and deadly bungee cord stretched too tight.

  You also had to be very careful that none of those bungee cords snapped back on you, or (if someone else was involved) the person you were trying to help. There was a lot of energy tied up in spells, and in magic, the laws of physics worked pretty well. All that energy had to go somewhere when the process stopped.

  She was treating this like a spell, and it was reading to her mostly like a spell.

  People always asked “What does magic look like?” and she always had to shrug, because when you were in the Between place where real Mage-Sight took you, it looked different to everyone. She saw it as elegant fractals of symbols, numbers, and relations, all in colors that told her yet more information about what was going on. But her mother saw it as lacework. And Hosteen Stormdance, one of her mentors and her parents’ partner at the Bureau, saw it as a Hopi dance-pattern.

  So this swirl of symbols whirlpooling around her told her, among other things, “this isn’t actually a spell, but it acts just like a spell, so you can treat it as a spell.”

  The black hole was very dark, and very deep indeed. But the bit of process at the bottom of it was as straightforward and as simple as she had hoped. The older a spell was, the simpler it tended to be, and the easier to deal with. Things that were natural abilities, like Grey’s ability to walk through walls, were also straightforward and simple. Primal. It made her wonder where Harmony had gotten this…and if it wasn’t a metahuman ability, what in the heck was it?

  Whatever…it was something she could handle. She dangled right on the verge of being swallowed up and looked it all over, twice and three times, just to be sure there was nothing hidden from her. She found one fiendish little trap, but it was something she had seen before—and Harmony must not have counted on someone taking this approach to saving Bulwark.

  Actually she probably counted on no one being able to save him.

  All right then. This was a running machine of sorts. She and Upyr had put a governor on it earlier, but that wasn’t going to choke the feed off for much longer. The fractals told her that the whole process was putting such strain on the choke-point that it was going to shatter soon.

  It was her job to shatter something else. To make the machine kill itself.

  Stop the machine. Just a sharp, hard, immovable spike—there.

  The proverbial spanner in the works.

  The process jammed. The tension built for a nanosecond, but a nanosecond is an eternity in the Between. She watched the fractals go red, watched the process strain and strain and approach critical. But her spike jamming the whole thing up held firm. The part Vickie wanted to snap…snapped. The machine blew apart.

  And, as she had figured, utter chaos broke loose all around her. From being surrounded by a relatively orderly swirl of symbols and numbers, she was at the heart of an avalanche of non-related bits that obscured everything else. A blizzard of possibility, causality, and insanity. And all the flying bits were attacking her. Not deliberately, this was all pure accident. But she had to get out of there before it cut her to ribbons.

  Now would be good, Red. She groped for the “lifeline.”

  * * *

  Across the canvas, Red stood opposite from Vickie, oblivious to everything but the creeping darkness that began to envelope him as she wove her spell. He was trying his very best not to panic. He felt a deceptive sense of peace envelope him, a paradoxical calm before the storm, because he knew what was coming. Sooner or later, there would come the jolt of sudden energy, a quick roar within the depths of his mind, and the very strength of his resolve would be tested. And every time, she had saved him.

  Amethist. Victoria. Vic.

  If there had ever been anything that he equated as home, it was her. The way their laughs fell in line, creating a smooth harmonic blend that quelled whatever damned thing they had just been arguing over. Her hair, how a slight change in lighting could make her seem like she was ablaze in soothing warmth. How she had felt in his arms, falling into him, they just seemed to fit together.

  Each and every time he had focused on her, on what she meant to him, and it had carried him through. With Victoria as his foundation, he had proved himself more than just an anchor, but stable enough to allow others to “mind-ride” with him, even taking complete control over his body in relative safety. It had been a rush, and giddy with the thrill of it his crew had attempted some terrifying acts of magic, constantly pushing themselves to greater heights. By the end, they thought they were invincible. Though Red himself had no magical aptitude, the strength of his will fooled his cohorts into the belief they could manage anything. They began to overexert themselves, until that last attempt…

  * * *

  It was Justine, of course, who had lost her grip. Justine the Bold, Justine the Pyromancer, the Chosen, the Forever Ticklish in Bed or whatever the hell she was calling herself that week. She had been a timid young thing when they had found her, but even Tomb Stone had to admit that she had some pretty remarkable firepower, raw as it was. And as her power grew, so did her confidence, her daring, and unfortunately, her recklessness. They should have seen it coming. It wasn’t the extent of her power that was the issue, it was her control—control, from someone who notoriously did not have a lot of self-control. What they were attempting would have taxed even an experienced mage. A frame-up, making it look as if the ECHO meta Pyroclastic had gone rogue. The first step had been simple. Red had done his job well, and he was the spitting image of the ECHO operative. It wasn’t enough to create the illusion of fire though. Pyro’s ability to ignite his body and hurl blasts of plasma had to be authentic. Within the confines of their circle, Justine had ch
anneled the flames to erupt from Red’s body, from miles away. That alone had taken quite a bit out of her, but when it came time to rein it in she had felt her grasp falter, then slip. And with that, the power, and the fire, turned on her. Red, safely tucked within the recesses of his own mind, watched in horror as Justine tried to sever the link. In a panic she tried to withdraw and let the flames roar, unleashed, to draw upon whatever source was handy. She cried out, her screams a constant ECHO reverberating through his mind, when he gave her a mental slap and tried to calm her down. Too late, the fires recoiled and raced back through the mystic tether to ravage her own body. They “watched,” stunned, as Justine’s body became her own funeral pyre.

  But that had not been the end. Oh no.

  There was a moment’s pause, just a moment, as they sized each other up. They had grown close in the weeks leading up to this job. Once shy and unsure, she had gladly followed Red’s lead. He was the man with experience, the one who strode with confidence from one job to another. She had known little outside of her own sad world where others, be they friends or family, simply took what they wanted of her and left her to rot. Red had been the first to care, and she willingly placed herself in his capable hands, learning whatever she could. She had finally found a mentor, a brother, someone to look out for her. He had taught her to take shit from nobody, to know what you wanted, and to go for it. The world was yours, you just had to take it.

  And at that moment, she knew what it was she wanted. This time nothing, and no one, was going to stand in her way. Not even him. There was too much at stake.

  “I’m sorry, Red.”

  “Justine, hold on, we can figure this out—”

  Red reeled back as she struck. His body staggered and collapsed, like a puppet with its string cut, as a battle raged within. A contest of wills. Two souls, where there could be only one.