by Holly Lisle
Willie glanced over his shoulder at Eric. "It is. But whoever or whatever caused the most recent spellburst is most likely linked to the problem we're trying to correct."
"I know. But we can't be sure."
Deever said, "I say we deal with the spellburst June Bug found first and see if that takes care of the problem. We can come back if we have to."
June Bug agreed. "The clock is running. We've already spent five minutes here."
I can read the damned clock, Eric thought, but he didn't say it. Instead, he said, "Focus east. We're going to drop both shield and ward and limit patrol to our immediate perimeter. Granger, you're doing the primary reset cast. Nancine, June Bug, Deever, and I will buffer feedback. Debora will maintain close perimeter patrol. Willie, you keep the gate steady, and Ernest has the pipe…Ernest, don't let this get away from us. Ready?"
Murmurs of assent.
"Then drop our extra baggage at seven minutes, and Granger, you be ready to cast ten seconds later."
"Right," Granger said.
"I wish we had more people here to handle the feedback," June Bug muttered.
No one else said anything. Their eyes were on the glowing red displays that hung in the air in front of them. With ten seconds to go, Eric braced himself and focused on the glow of the shield that surrounded them all, formulating the few words and the many shapes and sensations that comprised its unmaking and that would have to be cast without causing Oria's magical energy to flux.
Five…four…three…two…one…
Simultaneously, Eric said, "Drop shield," and Deever said, "Drop ward," and Debora said, "Patrol in close." Nancine said, "Clock on auto." Running a spell on automatic was risky, but June Bug had been right—there weren't enough of them to safely buffer a big feedback; they had to have Nancine's help.
The comforting, shimmering green sphere vanished, and a handful of tiny green stars appeared from the forest and began racing in a circle around the edge of the clearing.
"Brace for it," Granger said softly.
All eyes on the clock, on the racing numbers.
"Trace east, near and fresh," he said cryptically. "Identify; sequence; set strength; undo; equal return Eric, Nancine, Deever, June Bug, me." The spell he held in his head would be much more complex, but magic had little do to with words and everything to do with clear imagery and clear intent. The words just gave the intent and the imagery focus and set them loose. Eric could guess at the way Granger had structured the spell from those few words, though. Granger's spell would go to the site of the new disturbance and identify the magic that had been used and the things it had been used on. Then it would use the residual echoes from the spell to build a counterspell that would undo the spells that had been cast in the exact reverse order of their casting. At that point, it would measure the precise amount of power the counterspell would take—it would then pull power from the seven Sentinels to set off the counterspell and send the feedback through Ernest's pipeline back to them, where they would have to deal with it as best they could. It was a complex spell, neatly structured and economical, something Granger excelled at.
Eric felt the first little tendrils of magic curl out to the east. He waited. And waited. The clock in front of him showed that five seconds had passed, then ten, then fifteen. He tried to keep his teeth from rattling—the cold was getting to him, but worse than the cold was the stark terror at what he and the others were about to face; the longer Granger's probe took to build the counterspell, the worse the final news was likely to be when they got it. Abruptly, a massive surge of power poured into Ernest's pipeline—feeling it going out, all Eric could think was, This is going to be a bitch coming back.
He counted ten seconds on the clock—ten full seconds of waiting for the feedback to hit. It felt like ten hours. Then the magic hit; a wall of energy like a tsunami that rippled and stretched Ernest's pipeline and erupted over the five of them who were waiting to receive it. Eric lost his vision in a burst of whiteness and immediately after that lost his hearing as a thunderclap went off inside his skull. Hit by lightning, he thought, but that was the only coherent thought he could manage; in darkness and utter silence he fell to hands and knees as fire exploded inside his body and raged outward, searing and flaying every cell. Dying, he thought. Dying. He pulled himself into a tight ball and screamed silently, while inside his blazing flesh his melting bones waged war on his boiling blood. Dying. Dying. Let me die.
He could breathe again. Still blind, still deaf, he felt the worst of the pain begin to ease. He couldn't move. Couldn't feel any part of his body. And he thought, maybe I am dead. That wouldn't be so bad.
And then the unmistakable sudden vibrant electric surge of well-being that came from going through a gate.
Then darkness.
Silence.
Time passed, and he could not move, could not see, could not hear. This is it, he thought. The rest of my life with my mind trapped inside a body that doesn't work.
And then, gradually, he began to notice light. Next, movement. After a long while, he began make out shapes. And then he blinked and Willie and Debora were moving through the upstairs room in the flower shop in front of him, talking animatedly. He could catch little rumbles when Willie talked.
Then he could hear Debora clearly. "You're sure there's no permanent damage?"
"I checked before I brought them through. I checked. We couldn't have done anything for them if there was, but I'm positive they're all fine."
"I'm okay, I think," Eric said.
Debora jumped, and Willie turned, an expression of relief on his face.
"Eric, you're back with us."
"What happened?"
"Whoever cast that series of spells was…unreal. As far as Debora and I could tell, the main spell was pretty straightforward—it was the add-ons that were so nasty. In the middle of Granger's reversal, we had two ghosts show up—I think they looked familiar, but I only got a glimpse of them before they vanished—and there was this brief parade of images from different parts of the world. Almost like a slide show. And a good-looking fella in Air Force blues, and a little boy. And throughout the entire reversal, a thunderstorm was tearing up the clearing. Absolutely terrifying. Tornadoes touching down everywhere. The storm came first and finished last. Worst thing I've seen in seventy years."
"So the thunder and the lightning—"
"Went straight through you. If it had been real lightning instead of some sort of magical artwork, you would have all been dead."
"Why the hell would anyone attach a thunderstorm to another spell?"
Willie said, "Signature, I reckon. We tracked down a fella once who signed his work with a wolf. Long before your time, Eric, though June Bug will remember it. Damnedest thing. Every spell of his that we reversed, when we got to the end of it, a big white wolf would appear and rush straight for our throats. Made us jumpy, you can imagine."
"Why did he do that?"
"Turns out it was the way he saw himself. The lone wolf, the mighty hunter. He was self-trained—he didn't even know he'd made the wolf part of the spells."
Eric lay back and closed his eyes. His body still felt like it had been run through a cement mixer and poured. "So—did we fix it?"
"We don't know. June Bug hasn't come around yet, and neither Debora nor I have the coordinates she was tracking through the hand-gate. We're going to have to wait until she wakes up and gets her legs under her to find that out."
Natta Cottage, Ballahara
First, without warning, the house reverted to its old configuration. Lauren's grip around Jake tightened. He looked around and said, "Wow," again, softly.
Then the dust and the dirt returned.
Then the room got icy cold.
Then the lights went out.
"That can't be good," Embar said quietly.
"I think it's time to go home." Lauren picked up Jake and ran for the bedroom. Embar chased after her.
"What about finding your parents' records? I ca
n help you."
"We'll talk later," Lauren said. Her hand was already on the gate, the green fire was coming.
"I can come through if you want me to. I'm good at finding things."
Her hand slipped through the glass, and she began to step into the green fire.
"Do that," she said.
"I'll be along in a bit, then," he called after her.
And then she stepped out into her foyer.
CHAPTER 5
Cat Creek, North Carolina
TERRY MAYHEW SHOULDN'T even have been watching the nexus. He was supposed to be out selling a whole-life policy to a woman in Maxton who he'd sincerely hoped would want more than insurance from him, but she'd canceled on him at the last minute—and since he was already out of the office, he went home instead. Got himself a snack. Went into the spare bedroom that held his homegate. Opened the gate just enough that he could sit on the mirror frame, so that the magic that coursed between the two worlds would have to run through him.
He closed his eyes and felt the wonderful buzz that he always got from being in the midst of that energy flow. And then he sat there for a while, letting the green fire course through him, while his mind wandered. Nothing moving through the nexus except the usual noise; he was probably wasting his time. Eric had been adamant about all Sentinels putting in every spare minute they had watching for disturbances, at least until they found out what had happened to Molly McColl. Assuming the girl hadn't just gone out of town for a few days, which Terry figured was a big assumption, what were the odds that he was going to be the one to catch the kidnapper? He figured he'd get better odds playing slots in Vegas.
But the watching was pleasant enough, and better than getting the afternoon sales talk from the manager.
When the gate opened and closed, it did it so quickly and with such little fuss that Terry almost didn't check the directionals. The movement felt too normal. The gentle click ran through him in three dimensions, though he could only use two of them; they resonated through him like music through a good stereo headset. And just like wearing the headset—where he could visualize where the drummer and the guitarist were standing—he got a feel for the location of the opened gate. But unlike the effect he got while wearing a headset, when he turned his head within the energy flow of the gate, the distant point he was focusing on moved. And it wasn't in the direction of the Sentinels' main gate or any of their homegates, which meant this might be the disturbance Eric was tracking down. Heart pounding, Terry scratched the directional arrow on the wood floor with the tip of a wire hanger that was lying close at hand. Then he closed his homegate, ran for paper and pencil and compass, and spread them out on the floor beside the arrow he'd drawn. When he had the top edge of his paper aimed exactly north, he marked that edge with an "N," then copied the vector exactly, drawing it with a ruler. The line was only an approximation, he knew, but he felt sure it was a good approximation. It might be the final vector Eric needed to triangulate and pinpoint the site of the disturbance.
I might have him, he thought, and his mind tossed him the image of piles of silver coins clattering out of the belly of a one-armed bandit. Jackpot. I might have the kidnapper.
Paper in hand, he ran from the house, jumped in his car, and tore across town to Daisies and Dahlias. He hid the 'Vette back behind the flower shop and got a chill when he saw the number of other Sentinel cars already there. No one could have gotten to the shop from home any faster than he had, which meant that they had to be there for another reason. And when they got together at midday on a workday, the news was never good.
He ran through the back door and past Maycine Meyers, who was putting together a big funeral piece with mums and something purple and hideous; he managed to mutter, "Hey, Maycine," to her flirty greeting, but he was around the corner and up the stairs too fast to hear exactly what she said next. Didn't matter. She would hit him with it on his way down. The woman had a one-track mind, and whenever she saw him that track seemed to run right to his station.
He burst into the Sentinels' watch-room and seven pairs of eyes turned to him. "Where the hell have you been?" Eric snapped, and Debora, who looked like she'd been run through a wringer, snarled, "Figures you'd show up now."
Bewildered by the hostility, he said, "I got the vector." He held up his piece of paper.
Now all seven of them looked lost. "Vector?" Willie asked.
"On the gate that just opened and closed. I was in the loop when it did, and it wasn't one of ours, and I got the vector from my house."
"What about the level five—" June Bug started to say, but Eric cut her off.
"Not now, June Bug. Deever, maps."
Deever ran for the stack of topographical maps of the region that Eric kept in the Sentinels' flat file.
"When did the gate open?" Willie asked.
"Just a couple of minutes ago. Wasn't anyone here watching?"
Willie said, "We've had our hands full with other things. Thought for a moment that we'd lost five Sentinels—bad, bad feedback. Now we're trying to figure out if all that pain did any good. June Bug still hasn't got a read on whether the unspelling worked."
Terry felt that chill in his blood drop about ten more degrees. "Lost—" he started to say, but Eric cut him off.
"Not now. Give me your paper." Terry handed it to him without a word. While Eric lined up Terry's arrow from his house and penciled in the line, Terry asked Willie what was going on. He thought he was going to throw up when Willie told him about the level five rebound breakthrough and gave him June Bug's projected death toll.
"I was on my way to see a customer," he said softly. "Man, I had no idea—my cell phone didn't ring and my beeper didn't go off. It's just luck I was home for the gate. Just luck."
"Looks like good luck," Eric said from his table.
Terry glanced over at him, still feeling the sinking dread from Willie's news. "How so?"
"Cross your vector with the one we had from here, and it hits the center of that cluster of old houses on Herndon Street, between Guthrie and 381."
"I know the block," Terry said. "Passed it getting here."
"So do I," June Bug said. "The old Hotchkiss house is at the center of that block."
"Right," Eric said. He waited, an expectant look on his face.
Willie said, "With that gate we sealed off damn near twenty years ago."
"Right."
Deever was nodding, looking excited. "And Tom told us the first time he felt the disturbance, it felt like a gate being blasted open."
Eric scooped up the maps and headed for the flat file. "Any takers on a bet where our trouble is coming from?"
"Nobody's even living there," June Bug said.
"Not true." Eric shoved the maps into the flat file and turned to them all with a grim smile. "Not true. Place has been on the market for ages, but it sold a month or two ago. And I've seen lights on there the past couple nights when I've been patrolling."
Willie said, "Any idea who lives there?"
"Nope. Pete and I have had our hands full the past few days, so I haven't heard and haven't asked. But I'm about to find out."
* * *
Lauren, unpacking boxes in the foyer with Jake, felt the soft thrum of energy at her back that warned her that the gate had come to life. She turned, scared, braced for whatever might be going wrong; she grabbed Jake and tried to figure out where she could run if running were called for—and then Embar stepped through. At least, part of Embar stepped through. She could make out his form clearly enough, but she could see the mirror and her own reflection through him.
She took a step back. Jake, however, grinned and said, "Hi, doggie." Then he tugged at her shirt and said, "Please…down."
"Anything else going to be coming out of that gate," she asked Embar. "Or the rest of you? Or anything?"
Embar grinned at her obvious discomfiture. "Forgot that too, did you?" His voice sounded faint and breathy and far away.
"Forgot what?"
"Tha
t when we go upworld, we all get—thin."
"You aren't thin. You're damned-near nonexistent."
"I'm all here. The same thing would happen to you if you ventured into your upworld. Makes it very hard to pick things up, but very easy to look around." To demonstrate, he seeped through her floor. Jake shrieked in terror, and Embar immediately rose out of the floorboards, looking chagrined. "Sorry about that. Didn't realize it would scare him."
Lauren patted and rocked Jake, who wrapped arms around her neck and shoved his head against her shoulder, and he calmed quickly.
"There were things I wanted to tell you," Embar said. "I was trying to find the right way to get around it"—and here he closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his squashed nose in an oddly human gesture—"but I hadn't quite found the words when you ran off. I thought about things a little, and then I came on. Might as well get things over with, right?"
