by Karen Chance
“We all do,” Richardson commented mildly, offering his hand.
This conversation wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped, but at least we were talking. It was a start.
His hand was warm and slightly damp and his grip was firm—a little too firm. His fingers tightened as he drew me close, bending his head as if to say something privately. But all I heard was a low-voiced incantation that sent a sharp frisson running over my skin.
“Nick was my son,” he said gently.
I stared up at him, seeing the resemblance that should have registered before—the auburn hair, darker than Nick’s carrottop but with the same natural wave, and the eyes, surprisingly translucent when the light was right and dark as sapphire at the rim. And the expression, which told me as clearly as if he’d screamed it that talk wasn’t what he’d come to do.
Francoise muttered a spell, but before she could finish, Richardson flung out a hand and she went flying. Two of Casanova’s security team started forward, but the mages flanking us threw up a shield that they couldn’t penetrate. That wouldn’t last, but then, it didn’t have to. Richardson reached out and, with a savage motion, ripped open the air.
The darkness of the casino’s lobby was suddenly brilliant with icy blue light that highlighted the patched areas in the carpet and the hidden speakers in the corners. It made Richardson’s eyes brighter and colder even than they were while washing all human color from his face. I tried to shift but nothing happened. I pulled back, but his grip had turned to steel.
“We need each other,” I reminded him. “You don’t want to do this!”
His face took on an expression that was nothing like a smile. “Oh, but I really think I do.”
A movement caught my eye and I looked up in time to see Pritkin jumping down from the second-floor balcony. But it was too late. Richardson jerked me to him, an arm encircled my waist and we were gone.
I knew what had happened as soon as I saw the familiar tunnel of leaping energy all around us, although the sensation in my stomach—rising, sinking, a bit like flying, only far more terrifying—would have been enough. We were skimming the surface of a ley line, a term the mages used for the rivers of power generated when worlds collide: ours, the demon realms, Faerie or any of a hundred others.
For the width of a couple of football fields on either side was a sea of glimmering blue, a thousand shades from robin’s egg to sapphire running together like an electric ocean. In front and behind, energy sparkled and danced along gleaming bands of pure power, telescoping out to an infinite vanishing point. It wasn’t a calm picture: everywhere knots and snarls of blue-tinged lightning were tossed up like flotsam or, as someone had once explained it to me, magma in a tectonic drift.
The mages had long ago learned how to skim along the surface of these metaphysical hot spots, surfing their currents to rapidly travel from one point to another. The lines didn’t go everywhere, which was one reason trains, planes and automobiles were still in use by the magical set. Another was the fact that most people didn’t have shields strong enough to navigate this otherworldy highway system. Without them, the energy of a ley line would turn a human into dust in seconds.
“Shift, damn it!” Pritkin’s voice echoed in my ear, the connection staticky and weak.
Yeah. Like that never would have occurred to me. I glared at the passing stream of vivid color and wished I could yell back. But if Richardson learned we could communicate, he’d probably figure out some way to block it. The only way to retain my tenuous connection with Pritkin was to keep my mouth shut.
“Cassie! Can you hear me?”
I realized that I had to say something. He couldn’t help me if he didn’t know what was wrong. “Why can’t I shift?” I asked Richardson.
“You can’t shift?” Pritkin repeated. His voice was wavering in and out, like a badly tuned radio, and I wasn’t sure he’d heard me.
“Because it doesn’t make sense that I can’t shift,” I repeated as loudly as I dared. “And don’t tell me you used a null bomb, because then your shields wouldn’t work. We’d both be dead by now.”
“I used a null net,” Richardson said, strangely matter-of-fact. He sounded like we were having the conversation over lunch instead of hurtling down a magical river that was trying its best to consume us. “The power you’ve usurped won’t help you.”
“A null net?” I prompted, hoping someone would take the hint. It was a little hard to fight something I’d never even heard of.
To my surprise, Richardson filled me in. “A bomb is designed to project the null effect outward—to stop a battle, for instance. A net does the opposite, projecting the power inward, over a more limited surface—in this case, your body.” He sounded pretty pleased with himself; I assumed the net had been his idea. “It blocks your ability to access your magic but does not interfere with that of anyone around you.”
Pritkin used one of his favorite swear words, so I knew Richardson wasn’t lying. “Are you still on the Chaco Canyon Line?” Pritkin demanded, like I’d know. I’d experienced the part thrill, part terror of ley line travel only recently, since most vampires don’t find rivers of fire a fun way to get around. Tony had never used them, and as a result I wasn’t up on all the ins and outs. I knew that different worlds intersecting created different colors, due to variations in the atmospheres, but I hadn’t even begun to know which color went where.
I wouldn’t have had a chance to answer anyway, because a burst of power exploded right in front of us like a solar flare. The arm around my waist tightened convulsively, almost cutting off my air, as we spun out of control. The centrifugal forces were greater at the borders of the lines, where thick bands of power helped to push mages out of their version of a subway. Only we weren’t leaving. My captor merely used the opportunity to regain control before we were back in the midst of the stream.
“All this blue is blinding,” I said breathlessly. “I don’t know how you can see to navigate.”
“He’s taking you to MAGIC,” Pritkin confirmed.
“Yes, we’re on the Chaco Canyon Line, on our way to MAGIC, where she will stand trial for her crimes. Is there anything else you’d like to know, John?” Richardson asked politely.
“He can’t hear us,” Pritkin informed me quickly. “He’s guessing based on your comments. They weren’t exactly subtle.”
Well, excuse the hell out of me, I didn’t say.
“You can’t let him get you to MAGIC,” Pritkin continued. “Once you’re in the Circle’s cells, it will be almost impossible to get you out. I’ll create a diversion. Use the opportunity to force him out of the line, and I’ll follow you down.”
Right. Because I’d navigated a ley line on my own all of once, and that had been using an artificial shield because no way were mine up to this kind of stress. I’d almost gotten myself killed, and that had been without a war mage to incapacitate—one who I couldn’t knock out, even were that physically possible, because then his shields would go and we’d both die. The same was true if Pritkin’s “distraction” made him lose his concentration.
“Tell me, in your head, do these plans actually sound like they’re going to work?” I asked.
Richardson made a huffing sound that might have been a laugh. “Just do it!” Pritkin snapped.
I ignored him. I wasn’t going to risk getting fried if we were going to MAGIC. Because, yes, it was the mages’ stronghold, but it also happened to be the vampires’. And while the Consul didn’t like me much, she saw me as a potentially useful tool—and in vamp terms, that was better than affection. By now, Casanova would have informed the Senate that I’d been taken, and none of them was exactly slow on the uptake. Richardson might get more than he bargained for when we arrived at MAGIC.
Since I couldn’t very well tell Pritkin that without also alerting Richardson, I used the time to begin calculating what the Consul was going to demand for saving my life. No way was I getting this for free, even if it benefited her, too. That wasn’t how
the game was played.
A few moments later, Richardson started maneuvering us toward the side of the line again. I braced myself for what was usually the bumpiest part of the ride, which turned out to be a good thing. Because we hadn’t even started to exit when something smashed into his shields, shuddering them all around us.
For a split second I thought it was another flare until a weirdly distorted face appeared in front of me. It was bathed in jumping blue light, like a photograph taken underwater, and was squashed into the mage’s shields as if pressed against a glass bubble. But the wild blond hair and furious green eyes were the same as ever.
Shit.
The mage stared at Pritkin for a startled second, apparently as shocked as I was, and then he scowled and jerked us hard to the left. We bounced off a thick band of power running along the side of the line and ricocheted back the other way. As we passed Pritkin, who was trying to pull up from a dive toward where we had just been, Richardson threw a spell that exploded against my partner’s shields like a bomb blast.
I screamed, knowing what it meant if Pritkin’s shields failed. But before the blast even cleared, he plowed into us again, hard enough to almost force us out of the line. Unfortunately, Richardson recovered quickly and hit back, bouncing Pritkin’s bubble of protection so far into the distance that it was lost from sight among the jumping blue maelstrom.
“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 tr
ee 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.
