Ever After th-11

by Kim Harrison

  I turned to follow his gaze to the ugly, shrill line, slumping as my first excitement died. “I know,” I said dejectedly. “I have no idea how to separate the imbalances.”

  Bis moved his wings, the hush of leather against leather making me shiver. “Why does it have to be hard?”

  Bis’s head turned. A second later, Jenks’s wings’ clatter became obvious. “It always is,” Jenks said as he hovered before us, dusting heavily and clearly having heard Bis’s last statement. Behind him, a black shadow strode out from the surrounding woods. It had to be Trent, or Jenks would be having issues. Besides, no one else I knew moved with that kind of grace.

  “Well?” I asked Jenks, trying not to look at Trent as he rejoined us. Pierce’s warning was still ringing in me. I was not in love with Trent, and never would be—especially with Ellasbeth back in the picture and Trent on a mission to save the elves. True, we worked marginally well together. His unexpected surprises were annoying, but they did generally work out. And yes, he looked more than a little attractive in his sturdy black jeans, tucked-in stretchy shirt, and lightweight rain jacket. His fair hair was covered with a black cap to keep off the damp, and the black gloves were probably just for effect because I knew he wasn’t cold. But to entertain anything more than a casual work relationship was laughable.

  Seeing Jenks hovering over his shoulder, I was struck by how they managed to look as if they went together though they were nothing alike. “There isn’t much here for pixies unless there’s a tour coming through,” Jenks said, his face glowing from the dust. “They remember you being here yesterday, and a bunch of demons before that, but not one on his own like Ku’Sox. We did a quick survey, and we’re good for at least a quarter mile unless you count the raccoons.”

  I squinted at the line. “Okay. I’m going to take a look-see—”

  “You’re not getting in that line!” Jenks shouted, and Bis’s red eyes widened in alarm.

  “I’m not getting in the line,” I said, glancing at Trent to see him watching me with the same intensity as Jenks. “You think I’m out here sniffing fairy farts? Bis knows what some of the lines are supposed to sound like, and by comparing that to what they sound like now, maybe we can find the imbalance, bubble it, and move it out . . .”

  My words trailed off when Trent tilted his head. “That wasn’t our original idea.”

  Jenks hovered right before my nose, wings clattering belligerently. “Yeah? Then what?”

  I winced. “Maybe if I move it out, it might just get sucked back into place?”

  Bis was making this weird noise, and we all turned to him. I think it was his version of clearing his throat, but it sounded like rocks in a garbage disposal. “Ah, bubbled imbalance won’t get sucked anywhere,” he said apologetically. “But if you tune the bubble holding it to the same vibration as its parent line . . .” His words trailed off and his wings shifted.

  Trent’s exhale was long and slow. It wasn’t the immediate no I had expected, and seeing him consider it, Jenks seemed to become even more frustrated.

  “Tink’s little pink rosebuds,” he grumbled, landing next to Bis and checking the sharpness of his sword. “Now I’ve got two of them to watch. Whose idea was this?” He looked up at Bis. “Yours?”

  I waited nervously as Trent thought it over, his boots scuffing the gravel. “Tuning your aura to a line pulls you into it, so tuning a bubble, which is basically an aura-tainted field of force, will pull whatever is in the bubble to the line? It’s worth a look, since we have the rings as a safety net.” He turned to Jenks. “Jenks, what do you think?”

  My eyebrows rose. Asking Jenks for his opinion? Maybe the time they’d worked together had made an impact after all.

  “I think you’re all screwy in the head,” he said when Bis nodded his encouragement. “But go ahead. I’ve got Quen’s number in my phone. I’ll call him if you both explode in a flash of black underwear and money so I won’t have to fly all the way home.”

  Bis made a snuffing snort of a laugh, but I was thrilled, and my heart gave a thump and settled. “Let’s do it,” I said as I turned to the line. “Bis? You want to sit on my shoulder?”

  He nodded, and as Jenks crossed his arms over his chest and hovered over the wall, Bis made the three-beat wing flap to me, landing with his toes spread wide so he wouldn’t gouge me when he landed. The lines flashed into existence at his touch, but prepared for it, I gritted my teeth at the tinfoil-like sensation. It was awful, seeing as we were so close to a line, and I could understand why the gargoyles on both sides of reality were having issues.

  “Rache?” Jenks said suspiciously when my eyes closed in a strength-gathering blink.

  “Fine,” I said, then choked when Bis tightened his tail around my neck.

  “Sorry,” he said as he loosened his hold. The little guy was the size of a cat but had the weight of a bird, smelling like cold stone, leather, and feathers from the pigeons he ate.

  “My God,” I said as I stared at the line, a sharp pain starting just over my right eye. “This is awful. Bis, can you show me what one of the line signatures you’ve learned looks like?”

  Trent cleared his throat. “You want to use that safety net, or keep it in your pocket, Ms. Morgan?”

  I jerked, sheepish at Jenks’s severe look as I wiggled the rings out and extended them to Trent on my palm. Bis wiggled his toes as they glinted in the lantern’s light. “I think you’d have more control if you took the bigger ring,” I said, and as Trent reached for it, I closed my fist. “No funny stuff,” I warned, opening my fingers again.

  Trent put his hand under mine to hold it steady, jerking back in alarm when the full force of the lines hit him through Bis. “Holy . . . ah, wow,” he said, eyes wide in the low light, distress clear on him. “Is that what the line feels like to you?”

  Bis’s feet tightened on me. “It kind of hurts. Can we hurry up?”

  Immediately Trent took the larger ring. I put the smaller one on my pinkie, but if it was like our practice run earlier, nothing would happen until he put his on. It bothered me that the only way I could take off my ring now was if Trent slipped his over mine, nesting them on my finger to remove them both at once. It had been a scary five minutes figuring that out.

  “Here we go,” Trent said as he took his gloves off, and Jenks frowned, still not convinced. The glint of the pinkie ring twin to my own caught my eye, and I wondered at the connections we had. I still wore Al’s demon mark. Was it the same thing, or different?

  My shoulders wiggled as the ring fitted about Trent’s finger and a weird sensation of entanglement sprung up around me. Bis actually sighed in relief as the connection to the discordant line dulled. It was still there, but it felt diluted—the best I could put it was that the energy was now going through a maze of passages to find me. It was the chastity ring, and when I nodded, Trent eased the grip of it until the flow was again its normal self, almost as if he had lifted me above the maze and I could connect normally.

  Trent’s presence was faint in my uppermost thoughts, sort of like a teacher walking the aisles during a test. We were ready, and I closed my eyes.

  “Okay.” Bis loosened his tail about my neck and shivered. “Ah, I’m going to sing you Newt’s line first.”

  My concentration shattered. “Newt’s!” I exclaimed, heart pounding.

  “Newt has a gargoyle?” Jenks exclaimed, and Bis’s tail tightened until I nearly choked.

  “Rachel, will you listen? I think I’m going to spew pigeon feathers. Newt’s was the first one I learned, okay?”

  I nodded, closing my eyes again, which made me feel dizzy. “Give me a sec,” I said as I sat down in the puddle of lantern light, but then it only felt like the world was tilting.

  “Rachel?”

  Trent’s voice was close, and I put my palms on the ground for balance. “Dizzy,” I said, smiling at him. “We’re okay.”

  Jenks’s wings clattered. “This is as smart as sleeping outside in November,” Jenks
grumbled. “You sure you got her, cookie maker?”

  “I’ve got her. Just watch the woods, pixy.”

  “Listen,” Bis demanded as he resettled his wings, and I closed my eyes, feeling the pure ting of a rise and fall of sound, glittering in my mind’s eye like a silver thread of light, a bare hint of jagged red and gray and silver, half a beat out of step with the glorious hum. It sounded sort of familiar, comfortable. Like the line in the graveyard . . .

  “Got it?” he asked, and I mm-hmmed. “This is what it sounds like now,” he said, and I jerked as if struck when the world seemed to hiccup. The feeling of the line I was looking at with my mind shifted slightly, and sure enough, the ragged half step was gone.

  “No way,” I whispered, and my eyes opened. Trent was standing guard with his eyes on the forest line. Jenks was hovering at my eye level, his angular features pinched. Behind him, the line glowed like a deranged fair ride, dangerous and unreliable.

  “Rache . . .” he warned, and I held a hand up to forestall his next words.

  “Trent has me, and I’m not going to do anything Bis doesn’t want.” I reached up to touch the gargoyle’s feet. “Bis? You want me to try to find that ragged half step in the imbalance?”

  Bis jumped to the ground before me. The expansive backdrop of the lines in my mindscape had vanished along with his touch, and my shoulders relaxed. Bis shifted from foot to foot as his tail whipped about until he curved it over his feet and sat like a little lion. “I’m sure this is how to fix the line,” he said, and I heard a big unsaid however.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said to Jenks, then looked at Trent. “I won’t do anything until Bis tells me I can, okay?”

  Jenks squinted at me, and when Trent nodded, the pixy gestured sourly to Bis to get on with it. A four-inch man ruled us all.

  “Maybe you should bubble yourself first,” Trent suggested. “In case Ku’Sox shows.”

  It was a good idea, but as I sketched a small, easy-to-hold bubble around Bis and myself, Jenks’s dust went an alarmed red.

  “Okay! That’s it!” Jenks shouted, hovering before all of us. “I didn’t like this before, and I like it less now! Rache, there has to be another way!”

  Bis met my eyes, shaking his head so narrowly it was almost no movement at all. I looked past him to Trent, his stance stiff and his expression fixed. Ku’Sox was stronger than me. If we couldn’t fix the line and prove that Ku’Sox had made it, then how would we ever get Lucy and Ceri back?

  “Jenks,” I said softly, and he hummed irately at me. “It’s going to be okay. Trent will yank my butt out if I get stuck.”

  “I’m going to do a perimeter,” he muttered. “You and Trent do your magic thing.”

  He buzzed off into the dark, and my gaze went to Trent. I didn’t think Jenks was jealous, but it had to be hard to bear that I was putting myself in a narrow spot where anything bad could happen, and probably would.

  “Circle?” Trent suggested, his expression holding both determination and frustration for not being able to do this himself. I didn’t have a problem helping him. I loved Ceri and Ray, too.

  Feeling odd, I reached a hand to the informal but securely scratched circle in the dirt. It was small, but I was sitting. Rhombus, I whispered within my thoughts, and a molecule-thin sheet of ever-after sprang up. It wavered as Trent tested his hold on me through the rings, and at my nod, the circle sprang up strong again. We were good.

  Bis was well within my circle, and he fidgeted, a wingtip sliding out and back in through my bubble. He was the only person in two realities who could pass through my circle. It was why it took a gargoyle to teach a demon—or a witch, for that matter—to line jump. Gargoyles could hear the lines and tell those they were bonded to how to tune their aura so they would be sucked into the right line. What gargoyles got out of the deal was beyond me.

  “Okay,” Bis said as he reached out to take my hands. The harsh discord immediately fell on me, and I tried not to wince. His hands felt small in my grip, and I forced myself to smile reassuringly. “Take a look at your line here,” Bis went on. “I’m going to focus on it, and hopefully the rest of the background noise will go away.”

  My breath came faster as suddenly the only thing I was hearing/seeing in my mind was my ugly ley line with the purple core screaming at me. I couldn’t even hear the pure ting of energy behind it. It was disgusting. “Rachel?” Bis said in a pained voice, and I opened one eye a little. Behind him, Trent was scribing a larger circle around mine that could hold all of us. Wise man.

  “Right.” I turned my awareness to the purple sludge, careful not to get my thoughts near it and possibly get sucked in. Purple, everything was a blaring purple with fading striations of red, the sound of it rushing through me like ants, but the deeper I looked at it, the more I was able to listen past the purple coating to the twining colors behind it. Reds, blues, greens, oranges, and even browns and gold, just like auras, they swirled together but never mixed.

  “Find Newt’s imbalance,” Bis whimpered, and I peeked at him again.

  “Newt’s!” Jenks shouted, and my eyes opened wide to see him sitting on Trent’s shoulder, unable to stay away. “You telling me the line in the backyard—where my kids play—is Newt’s?”

  Bis’s face was screwed up, and he nodded, the tufts on his ears waving. I didn’t like the idea that the line I had claimed as my primary source had been created by Newt, either, but it was what it was. Trent looked a little ill, and I wondered whose half-a-mile-long line was running through his office, back room, and gardens.

  Fingers holding Bis’s, I resettled myself on the gravel path. It was obvious that this tight of contact with the line was hurting him. The discord was too loud, too painful.

  Bis’s grip on my hands tightened. “Now, Rachel.”

  I plunged my thoughts back in the line, ghosting through the purple haze, finding it easier now that I’d done it before, searching, discarding, sifting until I found the half step of red, tiny and lost among the rest. “Got it!” I whispered, heart pounding as I gathered it to me, struggling to pull it free of the rest. It was stuck like Velcro.

  “Bubble it,” Bis said. “Bring it out with you. With us.”

  With a curious flip-flop of thought, I bubbled the color/sound. My eyes snapped open as the connection broke and I suddenly found myself holding the memory of a mess of half-step red vibration in my mind. Trent was sitting before us, just outside the bubble with the line behind him. His eyes were wide, and I wondered how much he was getting through the rings.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jenks said, rising up on a dusting of blue. “That sounds like line jumping to me. Isn’t this what you did to make your broken line to begin with?”

  Bis was smiling, looking exhausted as his wings drooped. “She’s just going to move the imbalance, not herself.” He looked at me, his craggy brow furrowed in warning. “Right?”

  My hair was tickling my face, but I didn’t dare let go of Bis’s hand to brush it aside. “Right,” I said. “And besides, Jenks. I’ve got it already.”

  Trent’s face was alight, and I nodded at his unspoken question. Yep, I had it. It was doing flip-flops in my soul, and I didn’t want to think about what might happen if I accidentally let go of the bubble and the imbalance became a part of me, but I had it. It sort of hurt.

  “Your line sounds better already,” Bis said, his hand still in mine. “Do you remember what Newt’s line sounds like without the imbalance?”

  I bobbed my head, afraid to move. “Tune my aura to it?”

  “No!” Bis shouted, startling me as his wings half opened. And then softer, almost sheepishly, he said, “Not your aura, just the bubble around the imbalance.”

  I fidgeted, embarrassed that Trent had seen the near miss. “Should I think about Newt?”

  Bis’s red eyes widened. “I don’t think so.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jenks said sourly. “Rachel, will you just dump that imbalance and get on with it? Your aura looks really creep
y holding a chunk of Newt’s.”

  Trent was nodding his agreement, so I closed my eyes to better focus on the bubble of imbalance trapped in my mind’s eye. It was coated with my cheerful gold aura and a thin layer of demon smut, and I needed to shift it to . . . silvery gray red. Licking my lips, I screwed my face up as I tried to imagine silver pinpricks blossoming on my gold sphere, growing to encompass everything.

  “Tune it higher,” Bis whimpered, clearly in pain.

  “I’m trying!” I said, tightening my focus. My breath sucked in as the bubble flashed silver, overfocusing to a solid black. With a curious sideways shuffle, I pulled it back to silver, imagining a shading of a pure tinge of red lined with gray. For one breathless moment I held it, feeling my entire soul chime with the sound of silver light . . . And then it was . . . gone. There was a faint tug, and then even that severed, my awareness snapping back with a twang.

  “Rachel?”

  My eyes flew open at Trent’s call. He’d felt it. I thought he might. Heart pounding, I looked at Bis in the lamplight, Trent standing behind him with Jenks on his shoulder. The gargoyle looked as shocked as me. “Holy crap!” I shouted, my voice echoing back from the trees. “Did we—”

  “You did!” the small gargoyle exclaimed, and I ducked as he made one push with his wings and was through my circle and airborne, flying loops with the bats and yelling in delight.

  I beamed at Trent. We had done it. And if we had done it once, we could do it again and again until the line was fixed!

  “You did it, Rachel!” Bis said, startling me as he skidded to a landing on the gravel path, peppering my circle with kicked-up stones. His wings were spread and his eyes wild. “You did it! Look at that line! It sounds better already!”

  “We all did it,” I said as I dropped the circle to put a hand on his shoulder. The glory of the lines flooded me, and yes, once I got past the discord, I could tell there was the faintest lessening of the leak. Relief filled me, and I swear, I almost cried.

  “Nicely done, Rachel.” Smiling up at Trent, I accepted his hand and stood. Our pinkie rings glinted together in the light, and I didn’t know how to feel about it. My hands were shaking, but I was ready to put another imbalance back if Bis was.