Grave Dance

“Of course not. I—” I stopped because I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A mug jumped out of the dish drainer and headed across my kitchen floor. I threw open my mental shields as the mug hopped up to the counter and the cabinet opened.

As my grave-sight filled my vision, the bow under my fingers rotted, the fibers fraying and the twine holding it in place eroding to nothing. But across the room, in my little kitchenette, I caught sight of a small round figure as it jumped to the bottom shelf of the cabinet and used stubby arms to carefully set the mug next to the rest. Green quilllike hair trailed down the creature’s back, over the counter, and fell almost to the floor.

“Ms. B?” I called, which made the small brownie turn. She hopped to the counter, then down to the floor.

“Just finishing here,” she said as she scurried across to the other counter. She grabbed another mug out of the dish drainer and headed back for the cabinet.

I stared for a moment, feeling strangely disconnected. Then I stumbled toward the bed, which in my grave-sight sagged under the rags covering a mattress with exposed springs. “I think I need to sit down,” I mumbled.

Falin caught my wrist as I reached the bed, and tugged me upright when I would have sunk onto the sagging mattress.

“Don’t you think you should . . .” He pointed at my eyes.

Right, I didn’t want my apartment rotting away around me. I closed my shields, annoyed at the sudden darkness pressing around me. Only then did I sink down onto the bed. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and said, “I’m guessing Rianna sent you?”

“That she did,” Ms. B’s surprisingly full voice said from the kitchen. “Came to find you and discovered cream on the doorstep but no one keeping the house.”

I heard her bare feet scurrying over the hardwood floor, and then the bed shifted as she jumped up beside me. I opened my eyes to find her looking over the dingy and rotted bow that my magic had destroyed. It was large enough that she used both of her small hands to grip the frayed material, and the way her lip protruded made me feel guilty about destroying the damn thing.

“The house looks great, Ms. B,” I said, because I suddenly felt like I had to say something and I couldn’t apologize for the bow.

She looked up and tucked the bow in the leather belt cinching her burlap dress. She waved a hand through the air as if to dismiss my implied thank-you and then looked up at me. “The girl said you’d have a message.”

I nodded, guessing that “the girl” was Rianna. “Tell her to meet me at Central Precinct tomorrow evening at six thirty.”

“Consider it told.” She hopped off the bed, her hair twitching as it trailed after her. When she reached the door, she jumped, turned the knob, and then saw herself out.

I stared at the door for a long moment after it closed.

“So, a brownie,” Falin said, walking around the side of the bed. “You want to explain how you befriended a brownie?”

“Not really.”

He looked at me, leaning back with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, and I glanced away. I flipped on the TV to have something else to focus on. Lusa’s face showed up, but she clearly wasn’t in the studio. What is she up to now? Hopefully something that would pull attention off me. I walked over and turned up the volume.

“—we’re approaching the anomaly now. Ted, can you focus on that?” She pointed and the camera focus zoomed over her head.

The scene was dark. Wherever she was broadcasting didn’t have many lights, and I could just make out the shadowy shapes of tree limbs. As the camera zoomed, I caught the glint of moonlight off a reflective surface. Water? A bad feeling crept into my stomach.

“Are you getting it?” Lusa’s voice asked from somewhere offscreen, and the camera zoomed more. “Okay, folks at home, I don’t know if you can see this, but it appears that we’re looking at another tear into the Aetheric. The one we saw two days ago was bursting with raw power, but this one has only a couple of wisps coming through. This thing is huge.”

The camera zoomed closer, and she was right, it looked like a person-sized rip in reality. Crap. I felt like I was moving in slow motion as I turned toward Falin. His expression darkened, his full lips pressing tight. He tore his gaze from the screen and fixed on me.

“Did you?”

I shook my head. I’d ripped open those small, dimesized holes when we’d fought the ravens, the hole in the Quarter during the first construct attack, and, of course, the room-sized hole I’d created in my father’s mansion, but unless I’d merged reality from a distance or the tears moved, I hadn’t caused this one. I squinted, searching the fuzzy screen of my old TV set and trying to make out details of the tear’s location.

The cameraman panned, zooming out to pull Lusa back on the screen. She rehashed information about the tear in the Quarter and about what the officials were currently debating. Come on, Lusa, tell us where you are.

As she spoke, someone crossed directly in front of the tear, pausing to look at the camera. Because the camera was focused on Lusa, the person’s face was blurred. I was pretty sure the figure was male. His height was hard to judge, though he was taller than the tear. He wore a long dark coat, which even after the sun set, was far too warm. A passerby? A gawker?

“Can you tell who that man is?”

Falin tore his gaze from the TV long enough to frown at me. “What man?”

“That one.” I pointed to the figure in the background, and Falin’s frown turned puzzled. “You can’t see him?” I asked.

He shook his head. Okay, then. That meant, most likely, that the man was a ghost or a soul collector. The tear in reality scared me, but the fact that it was present at the edge of the river and that there was a spectral figure near it worried me even more.

“This is Lusa Duncan with Witch Watch live at Lenore Street Bridge, signing off.”

I was on my feet before the last words were out of Lusa’s mouth. I had my purse over my shoulder and was halfway out the door before I realized Falin wasn’t with me. True dark had fallen and he still had my keys, which meant I wasn’t driving myself anywhere.

“You coming?”

He stared at the TV and shook his head. “I don’t think you should go anywhere near that tear.”

“What? Why?” I hadn’t been the one to rip reality. I was sure of that. I hadn’t been anywhere near the Lenore Street Bridge recently, which meant someone else had the ability to merge planes of existence. I wanted to find out who. Maybe there was someone out there who could teach me how not to merge reality. Also, the riverside location worried me. Call it a hunch—which was surely nothing definite—but a twisting feeling in my gut told me the tear needed to be checked out in relation to my case.

Falin shook his head again. “Alex, what you can do, when you make the land of the dead manifest in the mortal plane or bring the Aetheric here, is called planeweaving. It is a fae ability.”

“You think?” The fact that the ability had gone into hyperdrive around the Blood Moon when, supposedly, my fae soul had awakened, was a good indication of the connection between the two.

Falin ignored my sarcasm. “Planeweavers are rumored to be responsible for a lot of things. The folded spaces, the fact that Faerie and the mortal realm touch only in small doorways, the fact that the fae can’t reach the Aetheric . . . There are legends and myths that date back even farther than the oldest living fae’s memory.” And that would be a long time. He stepped forward. “But, Alex, planeweavers don’t exist anymore.”

“I think I’m going to beg to differ on that one.”

One side of his mouth lifted in a lopsided smile. “Yes. Of course you exist, though it would be best if the courts don’t learn what you are. What I mean is that there are no fae planeweavers in Faerie. No feykin planeweavers either.”

“And outside Faerie?”

“If the courts knew about a planeweaver, they would be in Faerie whether they were mortal, kin, or fae. Which is why, if you don’t want to be dragged off to Faerie, you need to keep your head down. The tear in the Quarter already has rumors circulating in the courts. You can’t be seen near that one.” He pointed at the TV screen and then reached out and smoothed a loose curl behind my ear. “Officially, as far as anyone in Faerie knows, the only planeweavers that exist are a pair of mortals. They serve the high king, and rumor says they are the only reason he’s held the high court for over a millennium—but they are changelings, mortal captives of Faerie, which is as good as saying sterile, so there will be no more from their lines. I’ve heard rumors that the Shadow King has a changeling planebender, which is similar though not quite the same. Again, his planebender is a changeling, mortal, and the end of a line. There were apparently more mortal planeweavers in centuries past, but fae planeweavers have been extinct since the age of legends.”

And recently the legends had been returning.

The dread I’d been feeling since Lusa’s special report had aired intensified, and the clenching in my stomach moved to my lungs until it was hard to breathe. “I’m not a legend. But whoever opened that might have been.” I nodded at the screen, which was replaying Lusa’s footage. I’d already faced a legend forgotten in time—I didn’t want to think about how much worse a legend not forgotten might be. “So now what?”

“I’ll go check out the tear. You stay here, and stay inside. We don’t know when more of those constructs could show up.”

Right. I frowned at his back as he took my keys and walked out the door. Of course, he was probably right. I couldn’t afford to add any more associations between me and the tears in reality. The only people who knew for sure that I could merge planes had been with me on the night of the Blood Moon, and that was a short list: Falin, Death, Rianna, and Roy . . . maybe Casey—I had no idea how much she remembered. My father also knew, of course, and at this point Caleb, Holly, and Tamara suspected that at least I could punch holes to the Aetheric. But everything else was speculation and rumor.