by Amie Gibbons
He raised an eyebrow at me. “I can’t. You have to figure this out. I don’t know what you did.”
“Well, neither do I!”
I stomped my foot, glaring at him.
And the anger rushed outta me like a popped balloon.
“You really don’t know, do you?” I asked. “Crap. I don’t know. And it’s not working. It’s not doing anything. What did I do before? Why won’t it work now? It’s just not flowing.”
Wait a second…
I snapped my fingers. “What if my powers are like Mama’s? What if this is like writer’s block and I just have to figure out how to get around my own block?”
Carvi stared at me.
I waved my hands. “I know, you don’t know what I mean. Mama always said writer’s block didn’t really exist. She just had to do a ritual when she felt blocked to get into the headspace she needed to be in. She had to develop it over time, but when she did it, it’d work as a way to get her to where she felt she could write. It was all in her head, but since she only did those things when she wanted to write, it’d put her in the mood.”
“You don’t have any rituals,” Carvi said.
“No, I don’t.” I pointed to him. “And you’re not helpin’.”
He was suddenly in front of me and I yelped, hopping back and hitting the bed.
“Scaring you seems to work,” Carvi said, eyes glinting with danger.
But not in the fun way.
“Carvi,” I said, voice wavering, “please don’t do that thing you do where you scare me to get my powers to work better.”
“Why not?” he asked, voice echoing as his eyes went all black. “It works.”
We appeared at the top of the motel, at least ten stories up, looking around at the one to four story buildings around us.
Carvi grabbed my neck and fear shot through me as he backed me up to the edge.
“Carvi!” I screamed as he held me over the edge, staring me in the eyes.
Nothing in his.
It was like I was staring into the eyes of someone with no soul.
But I knew Carvi had one.
You couldn’t love like he did without.
“Carvi,” I said, breathy. “Please.”
“Please what?” he asked, voice as flat as cola left open overnight.
“Help me. Don’t hurt me.”
“I hurt people. It’s what I do best.”
“Bull. You helped me last week. You’re still helping me. You’re helping AB. You work for the good guys, I’m not sure who, but you do. You’re not a bad person. Why do you have to pretend to be?”
“I’m not pretending. I’m just good at switching. Get into that river you described, or I will get quite nasty.”
“Why?”
He pressed his lips together and some sense of humanity came back into his face.
“Because you work best when you have someone to work against. If I’m the enemy, you rise to the occasion to meet my challenge. It’s what has made your powers jump forward so much. When I push you, I get results. You discover what you can do. The more powerful your enemy, the stronger you learn you ar.”
I fought the urge to turn my head and look down.
Looking down would be bad.
“Mama always says a story is only as good as it’s bad guy,” I said, licking my lips. “But you’re not the bad guy here.”
“Oh, lea.” A smile actually made the edges of his lips curve up as he shook his head. “I’m always the bad guy.”
He let me go.
I screamed as I fell.
The wind rushed past me and I turned on instinct to take the fall on my feet as the air rushed past me.
And I slammed into liquid.
I opened my eyes in a river running blood red.
My river!
I looked around at the strains of different colors rushing around me and relaxed as a current of dark maroon took me.
I rushed down the way, feeling the liquid rush past me like I was wrapped in thin plastic, feeling the liquid and like I was getting wet, but completely dry when I focused on my body.
It was like the current couldn’t actually touch me.
So something was keeping us apart.
Keeping me safe? Or keeping me from even more power?
Maybe both?
I took a deep breath and it felt like good, clean air even as I saw the water move in front of me like it was getting sucked in by my breath.
The girl appeared.
Maybe Carvi was right.
I responded to fear.
She was the same as I saw before, but I could see her features in better focus now. She had the long blond hair and big blue eyes. Such a beautiful child.
Natalie.
Her name was Natalie Owens.
Daddy’s intern?
The girl who’d spilled coffee.
So the center really was at Daddy’s office. It just happened to be a college intern and nothing to do with him besides that coincidence of her working for him during his campaign.
“What are the odds?” I asked.
The picture blew up.
To the whole world.
I didn’t have to ask what year I was seeing. It was the present. I saw Daddy and his run. Saw his intern, living her happy, typical college student life full of kegs and boys.
Saw a different future where she’d killed herself two weeks ago.
Her mother, had to be based on the resemblance, found a book.
And a current of the deepest, darkest red reached out to her, lifted her spell up.
Made it work.
Work so much better than it would’ve without the help.
Why did that red streak look familiar?
The world stretched out and my vision focused in on another place.
Nashville, on Halloween.
And a heartbroken and strained M.E. casting a spell to remove her memories of her first.
The current grabbed onto it, blew it up.
Made the tulpa.
I saw more.
The current rushing around in its haphazard way, causing spells with no oomph behind them to work, nudging people to try spells they never would have even considered trying without that voice whispering, “What if it works?”
It reached around the world.
A time spell in Alabama. The memory removal that created a tulpa in Nashville. A spell to kill a dictator somewhere in Africa setting off a civil war. A spell to bring back a spouse who’d died of cancer raising an entire city worth of the dead in Shanghai.
A witch too young to know how to control her powers crying over a boy at school in Australia setting off weather patterns that caused a giant tsunami over small islands in the Pacific.
And even more.
That’s what Karma had been dealing with.
There were more of them. More… forces like Karma. Beings with power, ones hired on, others who took up the mantel to fight because they knew it was right.
But this had been going on for at least two weeks.
And this force was behind it.
But why?
“Why!” I shouted into the liquid.
The world shrank down to this town again, showing me standing on the street we’d been on a few minutes ago.
It was targeting these forces.
Carvi was one of them.
It had something to do with the assassins being sent after me.
And I was one of the targets too.
It was creating chaos.
“And why does anyone create chaos for no reason?” I asked the water.
“As a distraction,” my own voice said back.
“Holy crap on a cracker,” we said together.
The line of power in the river with me stopped and wrapped around me.
Letting me feel it.
Letting me know it was here with us in the past.
It’d followed us.
It’d pushed us into going back in the first place.
&nbs
p; We’d played right into its hands.
And it wasn’t done messing with us.
We’d opened the door for it to cause serious damage, and it took full advantage.
I opened my eyes in the real world.
“I know who it was, but we’ve got bigger problems,” I said.
“Yeah,” Quil said, voice heavy, “you could say that.”
I looked around.
Carvi and AB were gone.
“Where?” I asked.
Quil shook his head. “AB said she was going to get hot water at the coffee station at the front desk for tea and she didn’t come back. Carvi woke up right before you, cursed, and ran out.”
I closed my eyes. “Carvi! I know what, and who, did this, but it’s the what that’s the big deal. Carvi! Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said a moment later.
“Carvi, this is too much like what happened last week. It’s the same force doing it! And it followed us here! It’s trying to cause chaos, like all over the world, by blowing up spells. I don’t know if it’s a spell or alive or what, but it’s what’s doin’ this and it’s in the past with us. I felt it.”
He took a deep breath, and then he said the last words you ever want to hear when you are in the past and desperately trying not to affect anything.
“AB’s missing.”
My mouth fell open and I looked around. “What do you mean, missing?”
“I mean, she’s gone. Ariana, we’re in two thousand and nine.”
Why was that im-
I froze. “Oh my God. She wouldn’t…”
“Warn her younger self so she doesn’t make the biggest mistake of her life, thus changing the future? No, that thought hadn’t occurred to me.”
Chapter fifteen
“Where would she go?” I asked soon as Carvi was back.
He’d already lost her trail by the time he came out of the astral plane and tried tracking her. The motel smelled too strongly of mold and industrial cleaner for him to get a good handle on where she went after the stairs.
“That depends,” Carvi said.
“On what?”
“Oh, whether she’s lost her fucking mind or not. If she wants to warn herself, all she has to do is get a hold of a phone and call. It might not work, but if she’s not thinking that clearly… Fuck!”
He growled, turning and punching the wall.
His hand went clean through and I propped my hands on my hips, glaring at him.
“Yeah, cuz we’re not gonna have to balance that out,” I said.
He glared back at me. “I should have known. She was so close to the edge already. We never should have brought her.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we did, and now she’s missing. We don’t know what she’s doing. We don’t know something didn’t take her.”
“Find her,” he said. “I can’t believe you haven’t already.”
I tossed up my hands. “I already tried. Duh. I can’t see her.”
“What?”
“Either I blew all my magic on that river swimming thing, or something’s blocking me.”
He strode forward and grabbed my arms.
“Then you push past the block.” He squeezed harder and I squeaked.
“You’re hurting me!”
“Good. You might work. Kind of like smacking a remote against your hand to get the batteries to work.”
His eyes bore into mine.
“Carvi!” Quil barked, grabbing Carvi’s arm and yanking him off me.
Carvi growled and launched at Quil, tackling him around the waist.
They hit the ground so hard the cheap, generic pictures on the walls shook.
I froze, staring at them mere feet away, wrestling on the ground, each trying to get the other down long enough and throwing punches, mostly hitting air.
I scrambled back as Carvi landed a hit and bounced to his feet.
“Quil!” I screamed.
“You!” Carvi grabbed me again, giving me a shake so hard I knew my brain would be bruised. “Find her, find that force before it causes more damage, and let’s get out of here.”
His gaze drilled into mine like fire, half mad and about to destroy everything in his path.
“Carvi, please,” I said.
Just like I had on the astral plane.
“I can feel it,” he whispered, grip loosening as he sagged and his eyes lost the intensity. “It’s working with what I already want to do. It’s trying to drive me to contact Milo or my past self. It’s another voice in my head, but it’s so subtle I couldn’t tell the difference.”
He straightened, eyes hardening, “Ariana, get in here and grab onto it. I think it got AB.”
I took his hand, staring into his eyes.
Falling into them.
We stood in the middle of a fancy hotel lobby.
The same one I’d visited in July. The same one Milo had taken me to in a vision the night we met.
That deep red string flew around us, twined around me like a dragon flirting, and flew away.
I grabbed its tail and grunted as it snapped me off the ground.
Carvi grabbed my hand and flew along with us.
It dropped us in the back room.
Carvi made a small noise.
Because on stage, giving what looked like marching orders to the staff for the evening…
Was Milo.
Alive and vibrant, flitting around as he talked, then joking with one of the housekeepers, making her blush and take a roll of paper towels from her cart to wave him off.
“I remember this,” Carvi said in a rough voice. “He was… he was upset over Blanche. Those two were always on and off. And he was trying to make himself feel better. He got involved in some political project. A small local thing, and he was trying to get the staff interested so they’d go volunteer.”
I looked over and he shook his head. “I don’t even remember what it was he was so fired up over. He always did that, picked up some project here or there when something else was bothering him, especially a girl. He got so invested so easily. And it was infectious.”
“I can see that about him.” I took Carvi’s hand. “Carvi, the string is trying to distract us.”
He stared at his brother, mouth pressed into a hard line.
And a tear leaked out of his eye.
“Carvi,” I said, squeezing his hand as tears welled in my eyes. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine. I can’t. But we have to go. We have to get that thing to show us AB. I think it’s what’s blocking me. Its game is distraction.”
A tear fell down my cheek too and I brushed it away.
Carvi didn’t bother with his.
It drew an obvious line down his face from eye to jaw.
I took his chin in my hand, turning it to me as I thumbed away the end of the tear.
He stared down at me and I stood on tiptoe, closing my eyes and pressing my lips to his.
He kissed me back, light and gentle, just a brush.
Comfort more than anything.
Carvi rested his forehead against mine.
“I don’t understand,” he said quietly. “I don’t understand how God could let this happen. How he could take away someone so vibrant and selfless and good, and let evil like Jade live. I don’t understand this plan. I don’t understand this path. And if it’s my fault? Lea, I’m not sure I can live with that.”
I sniffed back more tears and took his face in my hands, bending his head down to kiss his forehead.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I don’t know what God’s plan is. But it isn’t for you to give up. Not you or me. Not now. We’re warriors. We’re in this fight, for better or worse. That means we don’t get to quit. And it means you don’t have the option of saving your brother.”
He nodded once, hard and strong.
I looked around, trying not to let my glance slide back to Milo working the room.
He really did have something.
Charisma.
/> Milo had a way of working a room and attracting people to him.
He had a way of making everyone feel like a friend.
My heart ached. I’d barely known him, but I missed him too.
More than that, I wanted to save him for Carvi.
And no matter how much we wanted to, no matter how easy it’d be to warn Milo, we had to resist the urge to change the past.
For the greater good.
And dear God, that sucked!
“He had a way of making it seem like he wasn’t going to help,” I said. “Like he wasn’t going to be a good guy. But he did the good guy thing anyway. I never could quite figure that out about him. Why he put up a front like he was a bad guy when he really spent his thousands of years on this earth helping people.”
Maybe he liked playing bad?
Made me wonder how much of Carvi’s personality was him playing bad.
And how much really was bad.
I looked back up at Carvi when he didn’t say anything.
“Find the string again,” he said like the words hurt him.
Maybe they did.
I focused and found it almost immediately.
I had its… scent, for lack of a better term, now.
It could run, but it couldn’t hide. Not from me.
I pulled with my mind and it appeared again. I grabbed on.
And we grabbed it, flowing with it again, the world swirling around us until we were back on top of the building we were on in the last vision.
###
I jerked up on the bed.
“AB’s on the roof,” I said, pushing to get off the squishy mattress.
“The roof?” Quil asked as Carvi’s eyes snapped open.
“Fuck!” Carvi said, running out the door.
Quil ran after him and I followed them, barely remembering to slam the door closed behind us.
Couldn’t have anyone stealing our phones and such from the future.
Why was she on the roof?
What if she’d snapped?
She’d been going through something this whole weekend. She’d be on the edge. She was obviously a bug’s butt away from breaking.
Why did we bring her!
I huffed as I hauled ass down the hall and hit the door to the stairs. I barreled up, huffing as my little legs burned.
The guys pulled far ahead of me and the door to the roof was already closed behind them by the time I got up there.
