Source

by King, R. L.

  She smiled. He was so amusing when he thought he had the power to do anything he wanted to.

  Still wreathed in her disregarding spell, she stepped out of her shelter and headed off to find him.

  The panic had not yet reached the outer edges of the ring of people surrounding the playa’s center, though the mutterings grew louder as some began to realize that whatever was going on near the Man was not part of the festivities.

  The red lasers still spiked out toward the top of the Man, terminating at points around the circle. Scattered fires burned as the lasers ignited the tents where the ritual points had been hidden, and began to spread to other nearby structures.

  Huddled next to a darkened van where Jason, Verity, and Sharra had left her, Pia Brandt gradually emerged from her black despair to realize that something was wrong around her. A quick glance up at the Man and the shifting portal forming around it told her everything she needed to know:

  Against all odds, Trin had succeeded in her mad plan.

  Some part of her—some deep corner of her mind that made her ashamed to even acknowledge it—felt pride as she took in the scene. Her theories—some of which had been called absurd and insane by other researchers—were validated. There was the proof right there: a portal—and not just a simple one, but a portal large enough to drive a steamship through—had been created without the expenditure of the vast amounts of money, materials, and magical power that were usually required. The ley line confluence, combined with Trin’s bizarre summoning ritual, had done what current magical science thought impossible.

  She wished she had never seen any of that research.

  “Oh God…” she whispered as once more visions of Anna appeared in her mind, and memories of her own cold voice ordering her daughter’s execution mocked her.

  More than anything in the world, she just wanted to be dead right now. She wanted all of this—the memories, the knowledge, existence—to go away.

  She shook her head.

  Not yet.

  She didn’t deserve it yet.

  She remembered Stone and the others, and what they were trying to do. If there was any way she could help them, she didn’t deserve to take the easy way out. Not until she knew for sure that there was nothing more she could do.

  Using the van as a brace, she dragged herself to her feet, put up her shield, and began struggling against the crush of the crowd toward the middle.

  Stone’s shaking worsened the closer he got to the center of the playa. A couple times he dropped to his knees, heedless of the pain as the harsh playa dust ripped into skin already scabbed over from when he’d fallen on the way to the hippies’ camp. Nausea rose, and the grayness threatened to consume him again. Will or no will, he didn’t know how much longer he would be able to hold it together. Seeing a discarded water bottle on the ground, he snatched it up, took a long drink, and poured the rest of it over his head. The tepid water combined with the chill growing in the night air to drive away the grayness—for a moment, at least.

  He had to do something. Even with the burning buildings, the growing multi-hued brightness of the portal, and the various light sources carried by the panicky crowd, he feared he wouldn’t be able to locate Trin. If she was smart—and he was certain she was—she’d concealed herself from prying eyes. At this crucial stage of the ritual, interruption could be catastrophic.

  He knew his primary objective was to stop the spirit from augmenting the portal’s energy. If he could do that, then the ley lines wouldn’t have time to operate, to mesh themselves with the portal’s matrix and join with it to make it permanent.

  But how was he going to do it?

  He stared up at it, his frustration growing. His legs shook. He swiped an angry hand across his forehead, flinging drops of sweat and water in every direction. His breath, coming through gritted teeth, sounded harsh in his ears.

  He had to do something, damn it.

  Before it had conscious thought to guide it, he brought both hands up, put them together as if he were executing a two-handed hold on a handgun, and pointed his index fingers at the spirit’s head. He screamed out a series of incoherent syllables at sufficient volume that the mere effort of yelling almost knocked him over backward, and sent out a shaft of pure magical force at the thing.

  The ley lines did their job: even with his shield up, even with his body barely responding to his mind’s instructions, it was probably the most powerful spell he’d ever cast. He held nothing back, letting the dark thing have his best shot, if for no other reason than he had to take some action or he would go insane with frustration.

  The spike of pure white energy, as big around as the water bottle he’d just picked up, flew unerringly from Stone’s hands, tracking an arrow-straight path to the shifting darkness of the spirit’s head.

  And vanished into it without a trace.

  “NO!!” Stone screamed, his frustration growing with exponential fury. He fell to his knees again, his head thrown back, his face shrouded in despair.

  That had been his best shot—he was certain it could have punched through an inches-thick concrete wall like it was paper—and the spirit hadn’t even noticed, let alone responded. It remained where it was, focused on the portal, which grew more substantial with each passing second. Stone thought he could see things moving on the other side, but that might just have been a trick of his mind.

  He blinked sweat and tears of anger from his eyes and continued looking up at the spirit.

  It ignored him, as it ignored everything else but the portal in front of it.

  “I can’t do it…” Stone murmured, his tone numb and lifeless.

  For a moment, he took his eyes off the spirit to look at what was going on around him. Everywhere, people were moving: the crowd was in full panic mode now, screaming, trampling each other, trying to move through with vehicles, setting any nearby structures on fire. Flames and smoke rose up to join the night sky, obscuring the stars in much the same way as the spirit was. A few people loitered in the center of the playa, but most of them seemed to have an instinctive idea that the large black figure standing by the Man was something to avoid.

  He couldn’t see Jason, Verity, or Sharra. He hoped they were still alive, and hadn’t somehow been taken out by the Evil’s forces.

  What did it even matter? In an hour they’d all be dead anyway.

  For a moment, he thought about giving up: about just sitting down where he was and waiting for the spirit to finish its work and make of him yet another snack, or for Trin to find him. There was a certain allure to it—to not have to always be part of the solution. To not have to be the one who made things happen. How conceited was that, to think that he could be?

  The feeling lasted for about five seconds, and that was only because his brain was running more slowly than usual. “No…” he said aloud, and the sound was a defiant growl through gritted teeth. “I am not giving up. Not yet.”

  He had no idea what he would do, but if he gave up now, there was no chance he could do it. Taking a deep breath, he trudged forward again toward the center of the playa.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Jason moved on inertia now. Frustration, grief, and a growing feeling of uselessness settled over him as he hurried along following Verity and Sharra, making sure to keep under cover of their shields as they chased down the Evil soldier who still struggled to elude them.

  The soldier wasn’t making it easy: he was small and wiry, and used the milling crowd to his advantage. So far he was still in the middle area, which meant the crowd was sparse. If he made it to the edge, though, he could disappear into the massive herd of panicking people and make his escape.

  If he didn’t get trampled first, of course, but Jason didn’t think he cared much about that. The Evil inside him knew what would happen if they caught him, if Verity got hold of him. He suspected that all the Evil had a pretty good i
dea about Verity and what she could do. For the soldier Evil, she was probably more frightening than Stone was.

  “Faster!” Verity shouted. She picked up speed, and next to her, Sharra and Jason did likewise. They began to close the gap.

  The Evil soldier would probably have made it if not for a very large, very drunk man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt who lumbered into his path, clearly oblivious to anything going on around him as his fellow crowd members darted around in terror.

  The soldier didn’t have time to change direction. He swung his little SMG around and ventilated the man, but couldn’t stop in time to prevent himself from slamming into him before he fell. The two of them went down in a heap as the rest of the crowd screamed and ran away in all directions.

  As Jason, Verity, and Sharra came running up, the soldier brought his gun around again and leveled it at them, letting loose with another spray that caromed off the shield and took out several more crowd members.

  Unfortunately for him, one of the rounds ricocheted and tore a chunk out of his own leg. He shrieked and dropped the gun.

  “Get out!” Verity screamed before he did it, pointing her hand at him. For a moment it didn’t seem as if it would work, but then the familiar gray puff of a weak Evil wafted upward and disappeared.

  All three of them hurried up to the former soldier and dropped down next to him. “We’ve got you,” Verity said. Jason snatched up the SMG and secured it, slinging it over his shoulder by its strap.

  The man, barely more than a teenager, sobbed in pain. “Oh, God, what’s happening to me? It hurts! It hurts!”

  “We don’t have time to heal him,” Jason said, looking around. He felt uncomfortable enough not being on his feet when this many unpredictable human cattle darted around in aimless paths, but a quick glance at the portal told him they didn’t have a lot of spare minutes.

  Verity grabbed the guy by the shoulders as Sharra turned to keep a lookout to make sure nobody was approaching them. “Hey,” she said to him. “We need help.”

  “You need help?” he demanded. He clutched at her. “My fuckin’ leg! It’s bleeding! I’m gonna die!”

  Jason slapped him—not enough to hurt him, but enough to get his attention. “Hey!” he said. “Listen to her!” He began ripping a strip off the bottom of his grimy T-shirt to use as a binding for the man’s wound.

  The kid looked at Jason, stunned, but settled down. “Huh?”

  “We need to know where the leaders are,” Verity said distinctly. “The bosses. We know they’re around here somewhere. Where are they?”

  For a moment, it looked like the man had no idea what she was talking about. He watched Jason tying up his leg with a kind of disassociated interest, and Jason saw he was going into shock from the gunshot wound. “Answer!” he yelled in the guy’s ear.

  “The leaders!” Verity echoed. “Where are they?”

  He thought about it, then something clicked into place in his brain. “Tent,” he said, pointing. “Over there. They’re all in there. That’s what we were supposed to do—keep people away from it. The big blue one. See it?”

  Jason looked, and he did see it: a massive pavilion-type tent at least three times as big as the ones at their campsite. “Yeah!” he snapped, standing up. “Come on, guys! I see it!”

  “What about me?” the man demanded. “I’m dyin’ here.”

  They ignored him. Jason felt bad about it: during his old days at the police academy before he got expelled, he had been trained to help people in emergencies, to take charge of situations like this and make sure whatever part of them were his responsibility were as secure as he could manage. To turn his back on somebody in need went against everything he was—but there were already thousands of people in need here. The only way he could help any of them was to help deal with the root of the problem. And that meant keeping up with Verity and Sharra.

  They ran toward the tent.

  Ahead of Stone, towering above him even more dramatically as he drew closer, the spirit continued channeling power into the solidifying portal. If he hadn’t known what it was and what it represented, he would have found the portal to be almost painfully beautiful, its colors growing brighter and more dazzling as it continued to suck in energy as fast as the spirit could provide it.

  Around it, the Man still burned. The flames had reached all the way to the top now, their tendrils licking up into the night like crazed cultists trying to touch their unseen god. The red lasers still pierced somewhere near the top of the Man, reaching their way to their terminal points somewhere among the campsites.

  They had to be part of the ritual somehow: Trin wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of setting this up so carefully if it wasn’t needed. Obviously it wasn’t intended to last for the long term, since the flames would soon consume the wooden form of the Man and the whole thing would collapse in on itself. But if it was meant to endure until that happened—

  “Yes…” Stone muttered.

  Maybe there was something he could do after all.

  He took a step back and aimed with care: not at the spirit this time, or the portal, but at the Man itself. This time he split his hands, pointing one at the structure’s head and one at the center of its body. Taking a deep breath and bracing himself, he let loose with two beams of energy.

  This time, the impact was more satisfying. The beams contacted the Man exactly where Stone had been aiming, and their force blew it into pieces, sending hunks of flaming wood flying out in all directions. They crashed to the dust of the playa, still burning.

  Another loud shrieking scream went up from the crowd.

  The red lasers winked out.

  “Yes!” Stone yelled, pumping his fist. Rather than draining him as he’d expected from casting two such large spells in his current condition, the small success energized him.

  Apparently, though, it had done nothing else. The spirit still remained where it was, unmoving and unscathed, focused on the portal. The portal itself also remained, shifting and shimmering and becoming ever more substantial.

  Stone bowed his head. Maybe by destroying the Man he’d done something he couldn’t see, or stopped something he had no awareness of. But he had no way to know for sure.

  Before she’d gotten a hundred yards from her little shelter, Trin saw the twin shafts of energy fly up from somewhere near the middle of the playa. She saw them hit the Man, and she saw it fly apart. One of the flaming bits of wood almost reached her, crashing down only a few yards away. The lasers, which had really been for show more than anything else—something for the hippies to focus on while the spirit did its work—disappeared.

  Trin smiled.

  It had to be Stone.

  He was running true to form again. The man could be dying, and he’d still have to be a fucking showoff. This time, though, it would be his last mistake.

  Because now she knew where he was.

  It couldn’t have been anyone else. There weren’t any other mages of Stone’s caliber here, unless they’d been hiding themselves well throughout the week. The apprentice wasn’t capable of that level of power, not even with the ley lines to help. She didn’t think the granola girlfriend was, either. That left Stone, and herself.

  And once again, he had no idea she’d found him.

  This time he wasn’t going to get away, though. She’d make sure of that. No more subtlety. If she saw him, she would simply fry him with everything she had. She was sure he had a shield up, but she didn’t think even his shields would be strong enough to repel her best attack in this magic-rich environment when he wasn’t expecting it.

  Her step had a new spring as she moved forward. She broke into a jog, wanting to make sure he didn’t move again before she got to him. Fortunately, there were nearly no other people this far into the center part of the playa—the combination of the spirit, the portal, the gory vaporization of the dancers, and th
e general mayhem had scared almost all of them into a panicked herd that tried to move in the general direction of “away.” That left the open area empty, and made it easy to see the lone figure standing ten yards or so away from the foot of the building where the Man had been perched.

  She studied him for just a second. Lit as he was by the flickering of the portal, he almost made her think he appeared heroic standing there—a tiny figure poised against forces he couldn’t hope to prevail against—until she got a little closer and got a better look at him.

  There was no hiding it: Stone was falling apart. He was barely on his feet, his body shaking, his skin pale, hair hanging lankly over his drawn face. No trademark long black overcoat that she knew he wore to make himself look more intimidating: it was impossible to look intimidating in a ridiculously oversized hippie tank-top and baggy shorts. All he looked was exhausted, his face a study in despair and hopelessness as he no doubt realized there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop what Trin had set into motion.

  She grinned as she raised her hands.

  Pia Brandt, her shield up to deflect the terrified crowd, broke free to the inner side of the circle.

  The trek had been arduous: she was neither large nor particularly strong, and shoving her way past dozens of bodies had taken the last of her energy. She blinked a few times and took in the scene.

  She saw the spirit, still where it had been standing, unmoving and focused and nearly solid black now. She saw the remnants of the Man, and the swirling rainbow colors of the portal looming fifty feet up into the night sky. The sight made her pause for a moment, a guilty sense of satisfaction coursing through her: a sense of that’s there because of me.

  And then she remembered what it had cost—and what it would cost—and almost collapsed again.

  “No,” she whispered, reminding herself of why she was here. She lowered her gaze from the towering things above her, and swept it over what was going on down below.