Are you sure you want to lose this? I thought, then quashed it. Sure, it was great seeing the world through a thousand eyes, but it had hurt. No wonder Bancroft had committed suicide. The Goddess could have them—have them all. It was like being connected to a line all the time. They were never quiet, and I just wanted to sleep.
“Oh, for Tink’s ever-loving humping,” Jenks whispered, a dull red dust seeping from him. “I think that’s them. Rachel, can you see?”
I nodded, feet shifting in the knee-high grass as I tried to dampen my aura. I didn’t know what I was going to do if they ignored the line glowing like a miniature sun between us and fell into me again. If the sirens rising up in our wake hadn’t been enough, I would’ve known it was them by little pings of energy they gave off like heat lightning. Thirty seconds. I guessed thirty seconds, and we’d know if everything was for naught or not.
Bis’s tail circling around my back and armpit tightened. “You want me to do anything?”
I shook my head, heart pounding as a cloud of mystics boiled over the tree line in a glow rivaling the moonlight. You go first, I thought at the mystics in me, and in a reluctant, swirling wave, they lifted from my soul. All of you, I reiterated, and disjointed images of the last few days sparked through my mind as they left.
My thoughts were finally empty, and I took a slow breath, relishing the silence. An adrenaline-based shiver shook me when the glow from the line jumped as my mystics entered it.
“Go, go, go . . .” Jenks whispered, and I found myself backing away from the line as a cloud of splintered mystics eddied to it and balked.
“Take them!” I shouted. “Damn it all to hell! Take them!”
“Rache!” Jenks shrilled. “Get down!”
I dropped, instinctively tapping the line and making a circle. Fear rolled up as the wet earth hit me and the long grass scraped my face. Every time I touched a line, mystics overwhelmed me. But this time there was nothing but the pure clean force of the line. She had them. She had them and they were no longer mine!
Relief echoed in my new emptiness, and with Bis standing beside me, I looked up as a white flash of energy exploded from my ley line. It lit the grove, turning the leaves razor sharp and the grass into slivers of glass. Lips parted, I watched in awe as for an instant, the world hung unmoving, and then the pure light was sucked back into the line taking everything not real with it.
The sudden silence was a shock, broken by the running creek and the lowering wail of a distant emergency siren fading to nothing. Before me, the ley line was a hint of presence, invisible as it should be. The energy in my protection circle hummed. It was simple, the one dimension of sound feeling hollow. Hand shaking, I reached out to feel the strength of it until I got too close and my aura broke the charm. I shook as the flow shifted to run through me back to the line. They were gone. Everything felt normal.
Everything felt . . . dull.
“Did we do it?” Bis asked, and I slowly sat up and brushed the dampness from my palms.
“I think we did.” Aching, I rose to my feet and looked at the moon, not believing it was finished. My brow eased and I almost cried. They were gone, and all I wanted to do was go home and go to bed.
“Bis, if your dad’s still around, I’d like to take him up on his offer of a ride,” I said as I thought of Ivy and then Trent. I didn’t want to travel through the lines right now. Maybe not ever.
He smiled, his black teeth catching the moonlight. “I’ll get him.” He lifted off in a downward pulse of wings, and Jenks darted after him. Somehow, I thought it would have been harder than that, and I sighed, feeling empty and one-dimensional.
Pain! Betrayal! Mystic emotion slammed into me, and I spun to the line as they darted into me, burrowing deep.
“No!” I shouted, hands over my head and cowering as more arrowed out of the line. I stumbled, falling to my hands and knees as wild magic flashed through me, and my hands gripped the soil as it burned and burned and never eased. What had happened? They’d gone in. I’d felt them leave me!
“You!” thundered a familiar voice, and I looked up past my stringy hair, gaping at Ayer standing before me, sopping wet and pale—too pale to be alive anymore. A cement block was tied to his leg, and he shambled forward, oblivious to it even as it brought him to a halt.
“Ayer?” I gasped, confused and unable to think past the mystics pouring into me, all of them frightened and making my head pound. How had he gotten here? How had he gotten twice dead?
But the answer was obvious, and I pushed up until I sat back on my heels, trying to breathe around the mystics in my head. Landon had killed Ayer. He’d dumped him in the Ohio River by the looks of it, where the cold had kept his neural net somewhat functional—because everything seemed to be working. As zombies went, he was a good one, because it wasn’t Ayer anymore. It was the Goddess.
“Ah, I can explain,” I said as I wobbled to my feet. The mystics were pooling in familiar places, making the pinch of wild magic almost bearable. It hurt, though, solidifying my idea that the mystics would eventually kill me, even if they didn’t mean to. I wasn’t a being of energy and space. I was made of mass, and I felt the power squeeze from me as my muscles bunched.
The Goddess’s eyes latched on to mine, chilling in intensity. “You took them,” she said, Ayer’s beautiful face and voice twisted in anger until they were ugly. I’d taught her that, either through my returning mystics or when she’d possessed me. Her power visibly danced over Ayer’s pale skin, cresting over him like a purple wave, little sparks of energy flashing like her eyes in the moonlight.
“You left them!” I backed up, wincing at the first cut of a thousand wings on my thoughts, and my mystics rose in outrage. “I brought them back to you! All of them! I freed them and brought them home! I don’t want them! Take them!”
Again she pushed Ayer forward, and he stumbled, almost falling when the block stopped him. “I can’t,” she said through him, and the rope dissolved. His skin, pale with death, was glowing. “You made them become. To take them back would make me become. I will not become. You will be ended, trickster Morgan!”
“What?” I kept moving, the long grass hissing against my legs. “No!” I didn’t understand, and Ayer’s expression bunched. I choked, hands rising to my neck as suddenly a wave of her mystics covered me, clogging my mouth and blinding my eyes with pinpricks of sensation. She was trying to suffocate me, and I staggered, panic rising.
My mystics rallied, rising from my skin to drive her eyes away and making the Goddess howl. In a wave of anger, she blew the grove apart. I fell, and from the corner of my sight I saw Etude spin away. Bis and Jenks were gone as well. Shaken, I knelt on the ground, my skin prickling with fire.
“You made them become!” the Goddess said, Ayer’s voice echoing in my ears as the vampire stood over me, the rank smell of dead vampire and soured river water filling my nose. “You lied. You stole them from me.”“They’re right there!” I shouted, just wanting her to go away, and then I screamed as another wave of mystics arrowed to me, pain bending me double as my throat suddenly clogged with feathers.
“I brought them back!” I screamed, panicking as I tried to shove the mystics out of my mind, but they slipped around my demand, falling back into me like water. “Take them! They’ll adapt!”
“They. Will. Not!” she thundered through Ayer, and the vampire’s skin flamed white. “They have become. Not again! I will not become again!”
But suddenly I could breathe, and I stared as the Goddess’s mystics peeled from me in a visible wave, chased away by my own mystics.
No . . . The Goddess shrieked and flailed in anger, beating at nothing I could see. They hadn’t been chased away. Her mystics were changing, becoming, in a visible wave.
Shaking, I got to my feet, still trying to figure this out as Ayer stumbled backward, the Goddess wailing as the gold of my mystics slurried through her purple haze. Like rivers in reverse, tendrils of light snaked through the aura of power surrounding her. As Ayer spun and slapped, the tendrils grew, became threads, became streams, became sources for more tendrils that grew into nets.
It’s the becoming, I suddenly realized. It was me, the way I’d changed the mystics in order to survive them. I was seeing the concepts and ideas I’d given them snaking through the Goddess’s psyche, changing her in turn, making her become something different, in essence, killing her.
“You brought them to destroy me!” the Goddess wailed, and then her anger crested to a savage ruthlessness. “There is one Goddess!” she howled, a burst of energy spilling from her with the sound of wings in the wind. “Your thoughts will be forgotten. I will make them forget. They will be forgotten and you will die!”
Shit, this was not what I wanted to happen. “I was trying to help!” I shouted, then froze when her Ayer doll suddenly collapsed.
For a heartbeat, there was silence. The haze of her power flickered, falling in on itself with a little pop. My mystics milled in confusion in the moonlit grove stinking of ozone and crushed grass. The cement block remained, but she was . . . gone?
“Jenks?” I called hesitantly, and then screamed, stiffening when the Goddess dove into my mind, ripping through me as if to tear me to shreds.
“No!” I howled, feeling my mystics hum through the spaces in me, driving her off as she dug, burrowed, and tried to swamp me. If she succeeded, I’d be hers utterly, becoming her forever.
“Stop!” I demanded again, wrestling for control, and with a realization come too late, the Goddess recoiled in sudden terror. She’d attacked me, but wherever her thoughts touched to destroy and rend, my memories sparked, growing like an infection among her own thoughts. Just as before when she tried to break the hold the Free Vampires had on her, the more she fought, the more she lost.
And the Goddess wept as she felt herself change, become something else.
Please, stop! I cried in panic, and the mystics carried her deeper, forcing the change. Go back! I don’t want you!
But the mystics weren’t listening. They’d seen, and they couldn’t go back. They liked the world of mass. Who could have guessed the limitations of three dimensions made a world richer than four?
Feathers beat on me as she tried to escape. The Goddess’s terror rose thick, twining about me even as I felt her change. I will end you! she vowed, the smell of burning feathers choking as she was suddenly fighting for her own existence. I will end your thoughts! I will not become again! A great wailing rose up, pushing through my own horror. You promised it would never happen again! she cried like a lost child.
I was killing her.
I fled. With a singular desire, I willed myself into the line, and then I set my mind to another far away. It was a safe place, one where I went to find solace, a place where she wouldn’t find me until I could figure out what to do.
Eden Park.
Twenty-Seven
Stay here, I thought, drawing the bored mystics back to me as I huddled on the bench tucked under one of the overhanging trees at the edge of the drop-off to the river. It was the best bench on the walkway in my opinion, being in the shade in the day and in the deep shadows at night, out of sight of most of the parking and all the open grass area. From here I could see a good slice of the Hollows, lit from the full moon and street fires as people gathered to defend what was dear to them. There was no power, and small but steady lights in the Hollows gave evidence of magic. Behind me, Cincinnati imploded in on itself, mostly ignored.
The tremendous wave of captured mystics flowing back to the line had missed most of the more populated areas, but even so it was only because people were glued to their TVs that the city would get through the night somewhat intact. Images of the stopped train and promises that the I.S. and FIB had caught the people responsible were a pressure bandage that would break when the Goddess finished repairing the damage I’d done and came hunting for me.
I could feel her even now, licking her wounds and forcing the mystics I’d left behind back to her way of thinking. Just as I had survived the splintered mystics by fleeing to return stronger, so would she, leaving a wave of destruction in her wake that would rival the Turn when she came to find me.
This was so not what I had wanted to happen.
The sound of a car coming up the winding drive became obvious over the background bangs and sirens. Tired, I pulled my feet up onto the bench and put my head on my knees as Trent’s heavy, bullet-resistant SUV rolled up and stopped with the sound of popping gravel. A quiver went through me, and I yanked back a wave of curious mystics.
His door thumping shut shocked through me, and a few slipped my leash, returning almost immediately with an image. His head was down, and his hand was bandaged. He had all five fingers, though, and he’d found a clean set of clothes somewhere.
“Don’t touch me,” I said softly as a cloud of mystics ushered him forward, feeding off a faded emotion, intensifying it.
Shoes scuffing on the sidewalk, he halted five feet back. There were no lights, and he was a dark shadow under the trees. “It’s just me,” he said, and his voice rose and fell, making my heart ache more.
Setting my feet down, I turned to look at him with my own eyes instead of the mystics’. “You’re full of wild magic. If I touch you, she might find me.” Anguish rose up, biting and thick. “I tried!” I wailed suddenly, and his head dropped in understanding. “They won’t go back. They adapted to me and refused to meld with her. Now she’s out to kill me, and if she doesn’t manage it, then she’s dead herself, changed into something new, something I made.”