by SA Magnusson
“What do you intend if not to disrupt them?”
“Why would I need to disrupt them? They are an ancient power and incredibly useful.”
“And yet you’re not using the power.”
“Am I not?”
I frowned. As I did, the sense of magic continued to build, surging around me.
“Dr. Michaels?”
I glanced back at Barden. How had he gotten here so quickly? Darvish was with him, and the woman stared at Barden before turning her attention to Darvish.
“You were dead.”
“Not so dead,” he said.
“I was there. I saw you.”
“You saw nothing,” Darvish said.
Several other dark mages surrounded her. Power built from them. I didn’t know the nature of the spell, but I suspect it was intended to contain her. The circle they formed around her led me to believe they were prepared for that possibility.
Would it work?
“You’ve made a mistake. And now you will suffer.”
She twisted her hands, making a tight spiral of them, and she disappeared.
A shout echoed from behind me and I looked back.
The mage reappeared near Jen. She grabbed her, squeezing tightly, grabbing for the wand, and made another flick of her wrist before disappearing again.
I lunged for her, but it was too late. She had disappeared, taking my friend with her, the friend who had wanted nothing to do with the magical world.
Worse, the mage knew that Jen was my friend.
“Dr. Michaels, we will get her back.”
“How?” I asked Barden. “She took Jen, and we don’t even know who she is or where she’s hiding, or even how she’s traveling.”
“You have traveled in such a way,” Barden said.
“Not like that. Mine is never that quick.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s not that you don’t understand the nature of the spell.”
“I have to get to my friend.”
“And we will.”
There was an emptiness within me. It was my fault that Jen was missing. She had come here, dropping me off at my request, and after telling me that she wanted to be separate from the magical world. She had wanted nothing to do with it, trying to find a way to remain my friend but also not get involved in things that were outside her ability.
And now it had claimed her.
“Barden. You need to take a look at this.”
Florence ran toward Barden. He followed her, glancing in my direction and motioning for me to follow. I wanted to be anywhere but here, but decided to go after him, knowing that there was a reason I had ended up here. We still had to deal with the rune the woman had formed. Would Barden be able to create a connection to the other side of the Veil for me to disrupt again?
“What is it?” Barden asked as we approached a clearing.
I could feel power building, and it was different than the last time. There was a directionality to it, a way that it pulled toward the Mississippi River, drawing upon the power of the ley lines. It was uncomfortable, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was a shifting, much like I’d felt from the Mississippi River before.
But not just a shifting. It wasn’t so much that there was an intent to change the ley line, but it was an intent to move the ley line.
Why would she want that?
“I can feel the intent behind the spell,” I said.
Barden looked over at me, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “And what do you feel?”
“There is some attempt to move the ley line. I don’t entirely know how they would accomplish this, but that’s the purpose behind it.”
“Can you tell where it’s pointing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell where it’s focused?”
I closed my eyes, thinking about the ley line, trying to get a sense of the power flowing through it, seeing if there was anything I could determine about it. The sense of it was there, distant, but growing stronger the longer I paid attention to it. It was pulling upon the power that flowed through the Mississippi, the natural direction of that ley line, and sliding it in a different direction.
The focus shifted, though I couldn’t completely tell where it was going or why.
“With just this ley line, I’m not sure I can.”
“It’s not just this one,” Barden said.
“What do you mean?”
“When you called, we had found another.”
“Where?”
“Along the St. Croix River.”
It was one of the other ley lines that ran through here. At least one of the more obvious ones. There were others that were subtle, and they might have been subtle enough that we wouldn’t be able to pick up on them at all. All of it worked together, a network of power that came together here, granting magical strength that allowed for the various magical factions to hold the Veil more effectively.
“I need to see it.”
Barden nodded. “I can show you, but I fear that her plan has already started.”
“What if I disrupt this one?”
He sighed, then made a quick circle around me, infusing power into it. I reached for that strength on the other side of the Veil and summoned my sword. When I did, I attempted to slice through the spell, using the power flowing to the sword to disrupt what had been done.
It didn’t work, not as it had before.
I looked over at Barden. “I can’t do it.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said.
“Why?”
“She would have anticipated what you did. If nothing else, this woman is skilled and powerful, and you have proven that you can influence the spells she places. Were I in her shoes, I would have taken the time to try to modify it, placing something else within the spell to prevent you from interfering.”
I looked down at the spell but there wasn’t anything within it that told me why I shouldn’t be able to carve through it. Barden was probably right. She would have placed a protection.
“Show me the St. Croix spell.”
“Hold tight.”
I squeezed his hand and he dragged me through his spell. When we emerged, we did so on the banks of a widely flowing river. A massive bridge spanning it stretched off in the distance. Birds circled overhead and clouds drifted over the sky. Everything here was peaceful, everything other than the sudden pulsing of magic that thrummed through me.
Three dark mages surrounded a spell. They weren’t doing anything to it, though it was almost as if they couldn’t do anything to it.
“How long ago did this form?”
“We detected it earlier this morning. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as some of them, though I think that’s because something was done to mask the shape of the spell.”
I focused on the power I could feel. Standing near the river, I was aware of the flow of the ley line, the same way I was aware of it when I was near the Mississippi River. I wasn’t sure why that should be. They were powerful connections to the magical world and I wasn’t sure why I should have such an attachment to them, though it seemed that was the case.
Much like the spell along the Mississippi River, this one had a sense of movement to it. It was trying to shift the alignment of the natural boundary of the ley line.
With the Mississippi River, I had thought that the spell was intended to draw the river in a different direction, but that didn’t seem to be the case at all. It was more about shifting the power flowing beneath it.
As I focused, I realized that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t a shifting so much as it was a shunting. The power was pulled away, drawn somewhere that it was not meant to go. There was a directionality to it, much like there was with the Mississippi River shunting. This time I could feel it.
It headed west.
I closed my eyes, thinking about what I had detected from the other spell. Where had that one directed the flow?
“Would Florence have a map of where these spells were fou
nd?”
“Of course,” Barden said.
“I need to see it.”
He grabbed me and, with another pulling spell, we disappeared, reappearing back near the Mississippi River.
“Where is your computer?” Barden asked Florence.
“Why?”
“To see if there is a pattern to the placement of the spells,” I said.
“We haven’t been able to determine a pattern. The spells were focused on ley lines, but as we disrupted them, new ones began to crop up.”
An idea came to me. “What if we didn’t disrupt them?”
Florence frowned. “But you were there. You saw that the ley lines were disrupted.”
“But what if they weren’t disrupted so much as having served their purpose? What if the woman who cast the spells knew that we would find them and only wanted to shunt a certain amount of power from the ley lines in a different direction?”
I hadn’t paid any attention to a directionality when we found the first few spells and doubted that I would recognize anything from the pattern, but the more that I thought about it, the more certain I was that there had to be a pattern.
“Where do you think she’s sent this power?” Barden asked.
“All I can tell is that it’s moving west, but I don’t know where. With the Mississippi and the St. Croix, there is a significant draw, and I suspect that whatever she needs from these two rivers was more significant than what she needed from the others. Maybe the other ley lines were less significant.”
Florence studied me for a moment before racing off to one of the vans and hurrying back. She opened a laptop she had taken from the van, glancing down at the ground and the spell emblazoned on the earth nearby. She punched a few keys and pulled up a map with push pins marking where the other spells had been.
As he stared at it, I couldn’t determine a pattern. For all I could tell, there wasn’t one.
I stared, thinking about it for a moment.
That wasn’t quite right. The pins seemed to circle the entirety of the city, though there was something else about it. Within the middle of it, there were other pins that took on a shape.
I studied the spell on the ground. Within the circle, there were other shapes. Several triangles, a series of lines, and a pentagram that seemed to bind everything. It was the pentagram I suspected I wasn’t able to overpower. It offered protection, and that protection would be more than even my magic would manage to overcome.
Could all of these attacks on the ley lines somehow form a pattern of their own?
“Oh,” I whispered.
“What is it, Dr. Michaels?”
I grabbed the computer from Florence, ignoring her protestations, and traced my finger around the perimeter of the city where the series of attacks were located. It was a much larger area than I had realized at first. Some of the attacks I hadn’t even known about. “Look at this. This forms the outer perimeter of the spell.” One of those happened to be located where I had felt the initial attack in Blaine. “Some of these inner ones are linked together, and depending on what intent they have, they could form a spell, as well.”
“She’s right,” Florence said, breathing out.
“You’re suggesting that these attacks are all a single rune?”
“It seems like it. I don’t know what the rune would do, but if the power here and at the St. Croix is pointing west, what if all of this is binding these ley lines together and sending that power someplace to the west?”
I tracked along the map, looking for what might fall along the west, at least from where we stood. We were near enough to downtown that it could be the heart of the city. It would be a good place to hide and I could imagine this mage having gone there, trying to find some way to stay hidden, and perhaps there was power within the downtown area itself. With the ley lines pointing in that direction now, it would certainly grant a type of power.
I continued west, staying within the circle that had formed around the city, binding it. I suspected that was part of it, that the perimeter indicated a sort of confinement to the ley lines wrapping around. Within it I noticed several suburbs, but none of that really made much sense. There wasn’t anything out there along the suburbs that would fit with an attempt to attack like that.
I continued heading west, and as I did, I thought that I understood what we were dealing with, though not why.
“Dr. Michaels?”
“That can’t be, can it?”
“What can’t be?”
I traced my finger along the pathway from where we had been along the St. Croix to where we were now, and continued heading west. As I did, it seemed as if my finger was drawn, and I knew that I was right.
I stopped near a massive body of water situated on the western edge of the city. The circle bound the entirety of the lake, holding it within, which meant that whatever spell had been done to hold the ley lines here had intended to encapsulate that lake.
And there was something there I had already encountered.
Not just something, but someone.
Barden stared, saying nothing.
“What’s out there?” Florence asked.
Barden glanced at me, holding me with his intense gaze, before turning to look at Florence. He took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “Out there is danger. Out there is Solera.”
18
A massive sheet of ice stretched in front of me, cold and uninviting. I didn’t know much about how early in the season Lake Minnetonka froze, but this seemed soon. The frigid cold we’d experienced over the last month likely contributed to it, making it so that the lake completely froze over far sooner than it normally would.
“We have to walk over?” I asked.
Barden nodded. “I don’t know any other way.”
“The last time I came here, we did so by car.”
“The last time you came, you demonstrated that you had an ability to simply transport yourself. Try it. You’ll find that you can’t.”
I hadn’t attempted to, though Barden had others with him who had tried to transport themselves across the lake. Something prevented them, whatever power Solera used to hold them back restricting access, and despite my best effort, there might not be anything I could do to change that.
“She’s going to know that we are coming,” Darvish said.
“She might know, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need to do this,” I said. Looking around, I surveyed the mages with us. Most of them were members of the Dark Council, nearly twenty, and many of them not people that I knew. I hoped that Gran and Gramps would come after getting my call, but what if they didn’t? Would the council respond?
If they didn’t, then we would have to go this alone, and I wasn’t eager to do that, not against Solera, and not if she had managed to alter the course of the ley lines.
We had to do this. Not only did we need to stop Solera, but I needed to find my friend, and it seemed as if everything was pointing us in this direction.
“She’s one of the fae.”
“She is, which means that she is especially dangerous.”
“I don’t understand why she would need to alter the ley lines. She already has a connection to power on the other side of the Veil.”
“Who is to know?” Barden said. “She has always been dangerous and has always done things a little different than others.”
The only thing that I could think of was that she intended to return to the other side of the Veil, but could she do that? It seemed an unlikely possibility, but then again, so did altering the ley lines.
We waited along the shores of the lake, standing in an empty park. Shops lined the opposite side of the street, though it was early enough that no one was really out. Either that, or too cold. In the summer, there would be dozens of people within the park, and dozens more boats out on the water. It wasn’t fully winter yet, which meant it was too early for ice houses to dot the lake, leaving it with this bleak appearance. I wanted nothing to do with i
t and wished that we didn’t have to go across it after Solera.
No one else joined us.
I shared a look with Barden, and we nodded. Starting across the ice, my boots crunching, an unsettled feeling crawled through my stomach with a sense of nausea. Every few steps, the ice popped and occasionally it groaned, leaving me fearing that it might crack, sending me plunging beneath the surface. It was cold enough that I would probably quickly lose consciousness. There were others with me, but what happened if the crack was wide enough to swallow all of them? Would magic be enough to save us?
“I really wish we didn’t have to do this ourselves,” I said.
“You sent word to the Iron Range pack?” Barden asked.
Darvish was listening intently and I shook my head. Whatever I had thought was passing between him and Ariel didn’t seem to have come to fruition. There had been some connection between the two of them, though it must not have been enough to fully form. But then, Ariel had other requirements on her time. It was possible that she didn’t feel that she could spend time with Darvish.
“I sent word, but you know how it is with the shifters.”
“When it comes to the Veil, they would come.”
“And yet, do we have any sense that the Veil has been damaged?”
Barden clenched his jaw. “No. There has been no sense of damage.”
I hesitated. “Can you feel the influence on the ley lines?”
Barden glanced over at me. “I trust that you do, Dr. Michaels.”
I held my hand out. “Wait. I’m the only one who feels this?” I looked from Barden to Darvish, and then sent my gaze across the other mages. Were they doing this on my behalf?
“I have a talent for identifying those with particular abilities. There is no question in my mind that you possess a particular set of abilities, Dr. Michaels. I trust you and what you have observed.”
“And what if I’m wrong?” The idea of it didn’t seem likely, but what if I was? We would be heading here, heading to attack Solera, all based on what I detected. Was I comfortable with that?
“Are you wrong?” Barden asked softly.
I didn’t need to focus very much on the sense of the ley lines to feel the way they had shifted. Standing on the ice, and a place where power flowed, I was continually aware of it.
