Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels)

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  “Great. Now put me down.”

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said, and now it was easy to read him. I didn’t need trace for that. His entire body screamed condemnation and fury. “It was too damned dangerous. Shit, Riley. Look at me. Look at what I’ve done. I can’t stop.” His hand jerked toward the winds raging beyond our little bubble. “I can’t—”

  He jaw knotted. I heard his teeth grind together. “Tell me you were lying, that you can stop whatever you did and break away from me.”

  “Nope.” I met his gaze. “I wouldn’t if I could. Either we get out of this mess together, or we go down together.”

  “God damn it, Riley! This isn’t a game.”

  “I never thought it was. But here’s the thing. I know you’d risk everything to save me, even if you weren’t really sure I am me. On the other hand, you might not do enough to save just yourself,” I said. “Now you’ll have to get us both out alive. Or not.”

  The tendons in his neck tightened and pulled taut. “When this is all done, you and I are going to have a serious talk,” he said, glowering.

  “Can’t wait. Why don’t you get on with your end of things?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You sound awfully sure of me.”

  “You’ve never failed me yet.”

  His gaze fixed on my neck. I expect the bruises ringing my throat had turned ugly already. “Haven’t I?”

  I made a dismissive sound. “Not that I’ve noticed. So why don’t you get on with hitting the kill switch on your magic?”

  I wasn’t going to say anything to Price, but I was beginning to feel the strain of feeding his magic back to him. I could still keep it up for a good while, but I was mentally and physically exhausted and travelling through the spirit dimension wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. I definitely had limits, and I was starting to feel them.

  “Riley—”

  “No,” I said. “You’ve got this. I know you do. Don’t overthink it. Just do what comes naturally.”

  “None of this comes naturally,” he rasped.

  “Fake it, then.”

  He just stared at me. “That’s it? Your best advice to me is to just do it and fake it? That’s all you’ve got?” The left corner of his mouth quirked slightly.

  “All right. Imagine your power is a really big light switch and switch it off.”

  He grinned. It was gone in a second, but I could feel a shift in the fear and tension roiling through his trace. It wasn’t as thick. Not only that, but I felt his trust in me strengthen.

  “Your advice is getting worse by the second.”

  “Just wait until I get to the old standbys like picture everybody naked and eat your Wheaties and wait an hour after eating before you go swimming. I’m full of helpful hints like that.”

  He smiled again, and this time it lingered a moment longer. Then his expression hardened. He closed his eyes and drew a long breath, his arms hanging down at his sides. He exhaled, then breathed in again. And then again.

  Nothing happened.

  I bit my lips to keep myself quiet. He didn’t need distraction, and I didn’t have anything useful to offer. Except maybe . . . “You can do this. I know it.”

  “Glad one of us does,” he muttered. Strain etched his voice.

  “Don’t be a pansy,” I said. “Suck it up.”

  His eyes opened a slit. “That’s not helping.”

  “You didn’t like touchy-feely encouragement. I thought I’d go for tough love.”

  “How about you shut up and let me concentrate?”

  “If that will help.”

  “It couldn’t hurt.” He closed his eyes again.

  Again I could feel that lightening in his trace. Maybe I was a distraction, but I was also helping him feel more in control and less vulnerable. More like himself.

  “You know that if you can’t shut this down, we won’t ever have sex again,” I said.

  His eyes popped open, and he glared at me. “Not. Helping.”

  “I just thought you might want some motivation. I mean, beyond the obvious.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I hate to ask. Obvious?”

  “The part where we won’t be having sex because we’ll be dead. But no pressure.”

  “Right. That obvious. No pressure at all.” He squeezed his eyes shut, but a smile ghosted over his lips.

  Again I waited. My heart skipped madly. My stomach twisted into corkscrew knots. All of a sudden, I had a crazy urge to go to the bathroom, and my nose itched. Stupid body. I hated feeling helpless. Being helpless was far worse.

  But Price could do this. He would do this. Because he never failed, and more importantly, we had too much at stake. Both of our families needed help, and then there was us. We hadn’t had nearly enough time yet. We’d barely gotten started. We needed more time.

  His chest rose and fell, the rhythm growing faster. His body clenched tighter than a fist. Still nothing. I raked through my mind, hunting for some little tidbit that might help.

  “Set me down.”

  It took a few seconds for his eyes to flicker open. “What?”

  “Set me down. Let me loose.”

  Scowl. “Why?”

  “Because I have to stop feeding magic back to you, and I need something else to tie it to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then you’ll eventually run dry.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “And if I don’t dry up before you’re exhausted and played out?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Because you’re superwoman?”

  “Because I won’t stop until you do.” I said it with fierce determination.

  “You’re delusional.”

  “I’m desperate,” I corrected.

  “So am I, but that doesn’t seem to matter much, does it?” Bitterness dripped from his voice. “Have you considered that my running dry could very well kill everyone that I’ve protected thus far? That’s”—his attention turned inward—“more than sixty people. I’m still feeding those protections. If I can’t figure out how to shut myself down while still leaving those intact, they’ll all die.”

  His words were utterly devoid of emotion, but that only told me how much the idea of killing so many people—innocent people—tortured him. That and the fact that he didn’t let me out of my little hard-air prison.

  That meant my idea was a nonstarter, which left me with only one other option to help. One very crazy, very stupid, very desperate option. It probably wouldn’t even work.

  Price scowled at me. “What’s whirling around in that bull head of yours?” He gave a sharp shake of his head and wagged a finger at me. “No risks, Riley. You’ve already put me through hell on that front too many times. Not again.”

  I just stared at him, my throat too tight to speak. He must have seen what I was feeling.

  “Riley,” he warned hoarsely. “Don’t. Whatever you’re thinking, for my sake, please don’t.”

  I shrugged. Price started toward me, fear etching grooves around his mouth. I didn’t wait for what he might say. He couldn’t talk me out of it. Instead, I closed my eyes and fell down inside myself. This time I wasn’t going to travel through my trace. I was going to travel through Price’s.

  Chapter 16

  I DROPPED DEEP inside myself, same as before. Instinct told me that I could only help him from within. I could show him how to shut off his magic. The trick was getting inside his trace. There was only one way to do that, if it was even possible.

  I didn’t think about the wisdom of what I was about to try. Wise or not, I was going for it.

  I needed to have an out-of-body experience. Short of killing myself, I wasn’t sure how to detach my spirit from my flesh. Yet that was the only way to make the
jump from me to Price.

  I dove down within, to the root of my trace. I found the bliss and ignored it. This was where my trace fastened into me. What if I cut through it? Would I be able to escape my body?

  I pulled hard on the energy from Price, turning it inward and focusing it like a knife. I’d never thought to cut through trace before. Typically, trace magic was more defensive. It wasn’t meant to strike out in any way. Time for this old dog to learn a new trick, I thought.

  Holding the energy so it didn’t feed forward wasn’t easy. All of my senses seemed to ripple and spasm, like I was trying to breathe water and my body knew it wasn’t natural. I figured that if this didn’t work, it might kill me, in which case I could do what I needed to. That’s me. Always looking for the silver lining.

  Ugh. Focus, Riley, I told myself. No more firefly thoughts.

  With that, I settled into the task at hand. I pushed everything else away, and concentrated on the energy building inside me. I saw it in my mind’s eye—blue-white heat and scarlet smoke. I made a hammer of hard gray light, and began to beat at the energy, shaping it into the knife that I needed. At first, the blows merely caused the power to flicker and bend, returning to the original shape like water. I ordered the power to harden, to let me hit it. Somehow it obeyed. I struck at it, over and over as more and more power fed into me from Price. I couldn’t let the extra leak off without ruining what I’d managed thus far.

  When I could do no more and I felt like I was going to shred apart from the pressure of the magic, I took the knife and slashed at my trace. I didn’t want to sever it all the way, just make an escape hole.

  The pain was as intense and all encompassing as the bliss had been. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Not just pain, either. A nothingness, a gray emptiness slipped inside me. It deadened what it touched.

  Urgency drove me to leap through the hole I’d made. Without my attention, the energy knife dissolved. I let the magic continue on its way back to Price. It would hit him in a massive punch. Hopefully he could handle it.

  Price’s burgundy-blue ribbon looped all around me. I paused to look at myself. There wasn’t much to see. Without my spirit, there was just a blank spot attached to a long streamer of green and silver. Some of that energy bled through the hole I’d left in my trace, clouding in the brilliant string jungle of the spirit realm. It looked like a stain. A thin strand of trace continued to follow me, looking about as strong as a spiderweb.

  I tore my eyes away and took hold of Price’s trace. I felt like quicksilver, with no weight to drag me down. Urgency spurred me. I flung myself along his trace ribbon. I hadn’t gone far when I hit turbulence. I clung to his trace as I was tossed, twisted, and dragged in a storm of wild currents pulling me in all directions at once.

  I fought against them, focusing all my energy on my task. Energy curled around me like tentacles. Thousands of invisible hooks scraped at me. It was like being stuck in a bramble bush. My attention blurred, and I felt myself hesitating. My focus unraveled. Bits of myself unwound and confettied away, pulled by forces I couldn’t see. I snatched at them to smooth them back down, to little avail.

  I couldn’t tell if the attacks on me were intentional. Had I just swum into a school of trace-eating piranhas? Was there some spiritual crocodile trying to drown me before it ate me? Or was this just business as usual in the spirit realm?

  Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going to make it to Price if I didn’t either hurry up or fix the problem. Fighting didn’t seem like an option. It would take too much time and energy to create another knife, and who knew if it would even help.

  I bumbled forward. It felt like I was bleeding from every pore. Shimmery strands of myself floated out like a corn-silk halo around me. I felt thin. Price’s incandescent magic ran through me like a river of flames. I pushed myself into the torrent, feeling his power crackling about me. It flared up, searing me. At least, I thought it was. I couldn’t feel anything.

  More tentacles looped around me, but then slid weakly away. They didn’t like Price’s power. Then something weird happened. Petals of hot magic swept over me like hands, smoothing out the ragged tears in my spirit and collecting me back to wholeness. How? Price?

  Or someone else? Too many questions and no time for answers and no one to ask.

  I crashed into Price. The collision sent shockwaves rippling through me. I’d already decided what to do and now corkscrewed around where his trace transected flesh, sliding through his skin, muscle, and bone and into the core of his being.

  I’d sent my spirit without my body, and now nothing stopped me as I curled myself into that place where Price’s trace rooted in his being and simply nudged inside.

  When I’d gone through that same node inside myself, it had been ecstasy. This was violation.

  His entire being contracted violently away from me. Energy exploded, tearing and twisting. I fought to retreat. Price’s trace thinned and faded to a water wash of blue and pink. A tremendous sense of horror flowed through it. Debilitating nausea and weakness surrounded me, leaching into me everywhere I touched him.

  Dear God, what had I done?

  With every passing second, his trace faded, turning to stagnant brown, then puke yellow.

  Price was dying. I was killing him. I had to stop it.

  Why hadn’t our touching affected me in the same way? I had no time to think about it. Pulling back wasn’t helping. I pushed up close and into him, reaching out all the magic I had to wrap around him. Opal filaments spun out of me like spider silk. They stretched and wove together as fast as I could think. They circled around his churning center. I fed all my love into the magic. I spun out soothing coolness and green forest silence. I thought of running streams and the safe coziness of my house. In every pulse of power, I promised sanctuary. More than that, I opened myself to him, inviting him to know me, to know how much I loved him, how much I admired him, how proud I was to know him.

  Hesitation. Then inside that little bubble, he surged, enveloping my spirit. He surrounded me, clinging and burrowing. The shock of it shook me. If I hadn’t known it was him, I might have shattered under the connection. I had no armor. Every part of my soul was exposed, raw. He smothered me, drawing me into himself. We wove together, separate, but somehow also one.

  His wildness tempered. His trace flared bright, like ruby wine under a bright spring sky.

  Riley? What have you done?

  His words vibrated into me. They resonated like the plucked strings of a harp.

  Wonder. Exhaustion. Bleak fear. Hopelessness.

  I’ve come to help you.

  Come? Then, How?

  Hell if I knew. But we were entwined. I could feel his emotions. If I tried, I could feel the grime on his skin and the grinding pain of his many wounds. I pushed my senses out, filling him, letting him feel everything that I was.

  Oh fuck.

  It sounded like a prayer. Like ecstasy.

  Parts of him contracted, and fire built between us. He touched and lingered in me. I tried not to notice the friction. The sensations were almost too much to bear. I’d never felt anything this powerful, this intimate. So far beyond flesh, and yet the pleasure was primal and excruciatingly profound.

  Still I could feel he was on the ragged edge. His power was enormous. He pulled it in from outside himself as well as inside. Air was his tool. He could snatch the winds from the skies and suck the oxygen from a room. He could make walls of nothing and turn thin air into a battering ram.

  I’d never known anyone with such capacity to wreak havoc. Total devastation. If word got out, everybody would want him.. Same as me. How was that for irony? We were going to be competing for the top of everybody’s most-wanted list. The couple eternally being hunted together stays together? Be still, my heart. It was like a Hallmark card.

  All the same, I
’d rather face the world with Price than alone or with anyone else. If we could get out of this mess in one piece. Or hell, a few pieces was probably survivable.

  This isn’t hurting you, is it? Anger edged his worry. Don’t risk yourself for me.

  I don’t know. And bite me. I’ll risk what I want for whoever I want, especially you. Deal with it.

  He tried to pull away from me. Yeah, I was going to let that happen. He and I were too intertwined now. I had him in a spiritual headlock. We’d both need to willingly unwind from each other.

  Dammit, Riley! This isn’t what I want! I need to know you’re okay.

  I will be. Just as soon as we get your magic under control. I’m not going anywhere until then, so you may as well just stop arguing and focus on the problem.

  When this is over, you and I are going to have a serious talk about boundaries.

  Sure. And when you convince me you wouldn’t dive headfirst into a wood chipper for me, then I’ll agree not to do the same for you.

  That shut him up.

  Now for the hard work. I explored inside him, learning his body, feeling my way out to the tips of his fingers and toes. I sank into a depth of emotion I’d not known he felt. He kept it hidden from me. For the first time I really understood the extent of his fear, his rage, and his love for me. The last was breathtaking. It was too big to hold. Wonder made me ache. How I had earned that sort of love? How could I begin to deserve it?

  What’s wrong?

  What do you mean? I asked, feeling like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

  I can feel you. You went into electric panic mode.

  Electric panic mode? What’s that?

  Think of it as ‘Riley freaks out about God knows what and does something incredibly stupid and dangerous.’ What happened? What’s wrong?

  Nothing.