But I cared far more for Julian’s condition than for his feelings.
“Please reserve one of the ritual theatres for them,” Grayson said. “We’ll be down there in half an hour.”
Stone reluctantly nodded his consent.
“Come with me,” the professor said, standing. “We have to prepare.”
~
The hospital’s supply room was stocked with more ritual tools than I’d ever imagined in one place. Smokeless candles, that wouldn’t endanger patients with breathing difficulties. Athames and larger sorcerer’s swords, of an “industrial” type anybody could use, though not as effectively as a personal blade. Wands, cups, and pentacles, similarly made. Staves, cauldrons, and bigger pentacles, for group use. Herbs by the dozen. Crystals. Bells and brooms. Mirrors.
Robert’s eyes gleamed, but our purpose kept his mind on track and his long fingers out of the drawers. The rest of the Circle filed in behind us, looking awed by the arsenal.
“First we talk,” Grayson said, stopping Liesel as she headed for a cabinet. “Then you outfit yourselves.”
Liesel reversed direction to rejoin the group. I didn’t blame her. There was safety in numbers, when Grayson’s attention was on you.
The professor pinned my roommate with her eyes. “Tell me precisely what you plan to do.”
Liesel shifted uneasily. She’d never faced Grayson before, and clearly wasn’t enjoying the experience. But she was confident enough in her own abilities not to be cowed. “I can’t say for sure until we see him. Pain-blocking, certainly. And reassuring him with the presence of friends. We might also try to veil key memories, if it would help.” She shrugged. “That’s all I can plan now. The rest will have to wait.”
I held my breath, but Grayson didn’t seem to be changing her mind. “All right. And the rest of you are here for power, I suppose?” They all nodded. “Good. Healing works better from circles than it does from individuals. I advise you to stay well back and leave the primary work to these three, but don’t hesitate to step in and support them. From what I’ve seen, they’ll need it.” Comforting of her. But then again, Grayson wasn’t in the business of being comforting. She was concerned with keeping us alive and sane.
“I’ll put shields on you now,” she continued. “If he turns against you, they won’t protect you entirely, but they should hold well enough until I can do something else. I doubt it will come to that, though.”
“Should we keep up our own shields?” Michele asked.
“Absolutely. Layer them over mine, so he senses yours first. Every little bit will help, if there’s trouble. And trouble can come in different forms, remember. He may not attack, but you don’t want to be dragged in by his madness, either.”
I tried not to let my fear show. I remembered that madness all too well.
And now I was going back to face it a second time.
Grayson began to shield everyone. I watched with interest, despite my nervousness. She was drawing on some sort of power reservoir, of course, which was why she could cover eight people without needing a ritual to raise the energy. The protections she was putting up weren’t ordinary shields, either. They weren’t the active combat structures Julian had described to me, but they weren’t daily wear. Grayson constructed them too quickly for me to pick up all the details, unfortunately. Maybe I should take a class from her—if she had one lighter than Combat Shielding.
But even that one hadn’t helped Julian.
I banished such thoughts. The last thing I needed was to hamstring my own concentration with extraneous thoughts. What mattered right now was helping Julian, not brooding over what had harmed him.
Grayson shielded me last. The protection felt like a warm blanket, until I probed it; then it came across more like armor plating. Armor sounded like a good idea.
“All right,” she said. “Get the supplies you need.”
Under Liesel’s direction, we dispersed around the room. We all had our athames, but we needed candles and the like. The Circle worked efficiently. I was pleased to see that although we hadn’t planned everything in advance, we managed to act smoothly and professionally, as if we actually had a clue what we were doing.
And then we had everything, and it was time to go.
“Follow me,” Grayson said.
A hospital ritual theatre was a strange place, I decided, looking around as we walked in. It was a bizarre mix of the elegant trappings of ceremonial magic and the spartan impersonality of medicine. The candle-holders were plain copper; so was the circle laid into the tile floor. Places like this were why I preferred to work outdoors. But copper held a magical charge well, and tile was infinitely more hygienic than dirt. Hospitals were big on hygiene, even when a patient wasn’t physically sick.
A door on the far side opened, and two orderlies wheeled a gurney in. As it neared, I saw Julian beneath the sheet. From a distance, he resembled a corpse. Closer up, his sleep didn’t look peaceful, but at least he wasn’t tossing and turning. More color had come back into his skin, too. Now he only looked half-dead.
“Lord and Lady,” Michele whispered.
I remembered then that the others hadn’t seen him before now. I looked at Julian and saw improvement; they looked and saw only damage. From that perspective, he appeared awful. “He really does need our help,” Geoff murmured.
At least his condition hadn’t frightened them off. Indeed, it seemed to strengthen their determination. The blood had drained from Liesel’s face; I suspected she’d checked his aura. But she pulled herself together. “All right,” she muttered, straightening her shoulders. “Anybody object if we pray before we start?” Heads shook all around the room, including mine. Having already prayed for Julian’s safety once before, I could hardly object to doing it again. We joined hands and let our energies flow together. Even if the Lord and Lady didn’t choose to listen to the words Michele murmured, this brief circle helped us mesh with each other. We’d need to be synchronized, for this to work.
Liesel had closed her eyes during the prayer. When she opened them, I saw calm determination there. “Normal circle to get things set up,” she said. “Then let’s shift to a triangle-in-pentacle: Robert, Kim, and me in the center, with the other five on the edge. Channel power to Robert. He’ll pass it to me, and I’ll direct Kim. The rest of you, stay distant enough that Julian won’t feel you, at least at first. Sound good?” Murmurs of agreement. “Let’s get started.”
Grayson nodded to the orderlies, and they left. I saw that she had control of the shields on Julian; they were massive things, and actively maintained. So were the shields on the room, worked into the tiles. This place was built like the magical equivalent of a nuclear bunker. I remembered the power I’d felt in him before, and appreciated the precautions. Strength like that, uncontrolled, could be disastrous.
But my job was to make sure that didn’t happen. And to that end, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the focus Julian had given me. I’d managed to bend the links of the snapped chain back together well enough to hold, and now I put it around my neck. Hopefully he would recognize it—recognize me—and not fight.
With the prayer as a warm-up, we moved smoothly through the first steps of the ritual. Grayson’s words to me in her office had proved right; apparently all it took to make me get over my Yan-inspired difficulties was a couple of attacks by the Unseelie Court. I still wasn’t sure how I’d fare with more advanced magic, but basic circling and shielding, I could do.
Then we were ready, a triangle within a pentacle, and it was time for me to lead.
I reached out hesitantly. Grayson, watching from outside the circle, allowed me to pass through the shields.
Julian’s madness brushed the edges of my mind. My shoulders tensed in resistance. Liesel, next to me, turned ghost-white. She was probably reading this much more strongly than I. And yet her determination to help did not waver.
But first I had to contact him.
Julian? I whispered telepathically.
>
No verbal answer; I hadn’t expected one. He wasn’t thinking articulately, bar the occasional screams in his memory. I sensed in him wariness, fear, the tension of a wounded animal at bay. My heart ached. I sent another thought gently his way, an identification of myself.
A pause. He seemed to be considering. And then, slowly, hesitantly, he relaxed his guards and let me in closer.
Liesel was receiving the impressions directly from me, but she was the only one. Robert wasn’t a good enough telepath to maintain a link for long, and without him, the rest of the Circle was more or less blind. Which was all to the good. They could see enough to work, but I didn’t want to compromise Julian’s privacy more than necessary.
What my roommate and I were treated to was not a pretty sight. My first impression was that someone had tried to tear Julian in half, and had come frighteningly close to succeeding. His mind was raw and bleeding. Only his strength had held him together. Voices screamed at him from every side, some intelligible, the vast majority not.
Liesel was momentarily at a loss. She recovered quickly, though, and began to instruct me. Under her direction, I “splinted” the damage, wrapping warm bands of healing energy around Julian to hold his mind together. With that pressure relieved, we were able to start laying blocks against the pain, from where his gifts had been scraped raw. I even put up thin barriers over some of the worst memories. I didn’t dare come close enough to know what they held, for fear I’d be pulled in, but it was easy to tell which ones were dangerous. They shone like bloody beacons in Julian’s mind. When he recovered, he could take the blocks down himself, but in the meantime, they’d protect him from flashbacks.
And throughout it all, I continually reminded Julian of our presence. First of Liesel and Robert, near me and trusted; then, one by one, the rest of the Circle. Grayson I left out. He probably couldn’t sense her through the circle perimeter anyway, not seared as he was.
While I worked, his subconscious mind began to prowl about restlessly. Just as Liesel admitted she couldn’t think of anything more to do, he found the shields Grayson was maintaining over him.
I will not be chained!
Power—more than I would have thought he could muster in his condition—came out of nowhere to explode against the shields. They reflected the energy back at him, and I barely managed to throw up more shields to protect him before it hit. “Gods damn it, Grayson, that’ll kill him!” I screamed.
From outside the circle, I heard her swear blisteringly. The shields shifted just before Julian blasted through my feeble protections and attacked again. He wasn’t after me; I was just in his way, and swatted aside like a fly. His enemy was the barrier she held. At least she’d stripped the reflective layer—what idiot put that on him? Not Grayson, I was sure. She had more sense.
Julian’s mind was a wordless blaze of fury. A wilder was often a match for a Ps.D., Grayson had said. If this came down to battle between them … why was Julian attacking?
The answer was staring me in the face.
“Drop the shields!” I shouted.
Another hit. Grayson was holding steady, but I didn’t want to think about what this might be doing to Julian. “Do it!”
They vanished.
Julian had already sent another bolt flying. It slammed into the circle perimeter, and some of it penetrated our barrier to collide with the room shields. We couldn’t take much more of this. But that was his last strike; as the energy flared and faded, he subsided. I felt him probe around a few times, making sure nothing else was constraining him, and then he retreated back into himself, shutting out the world.
The other Circle members were reeling. “Hold the link,” I said through clenched teeth. “We have to check him.”
Julian was in total withdrawal again. Our work had done some good, though; he no longer radiated pain. In fact, he seemed to be on the mend. And with the shields on him gone, I was willing to bet there would be no more upheavals.
“All right,” I said at last, sagging with weariness. “Let’s close this down.”
Chapter Seven
“What set him off?” Michele asked from where she had collapsed in a chair.
“The goddamned shields.” I flung my athame onto the table in fury. “Grayson, who the hell designed them like that, to throw his own power back at him?”
“I don’t know,” the professor replied grimly. “But I intend to find out. I should have inspected them more carefully myself, but I just took them over as a unit and didn’t examine all the components.”
“They shouldn’t have been on him in the first place.”
“I realized that at the same time you did. I’m sorry it took so long to take them down, but they were designed to prevent easy removal.” She snorted in disgust. “Flagrant stupidity. I will speak to that doctor of his.” I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that man’s shoes, not with Grayson in this kind of mood.
“Why did the shields send him over the edge?” Geoff asked.
I exchanged looks with Liesel and Robert. When Julian’s mind blazed into life, we’d caught some of what drove his fury, but not all. “He doesn’t like to be confined. In any way. Particularly when someone’s trying to stop him from using his gifts. It’s something that dates back a long time, I think. Before now he was too far in retreat to realize those shields were there, but our healing woke him up.” My eyes flicked to Grayson. “I told you not to tie him down again. That applies to this too.”
The others gaped to hear me give orders to a professor, but she was nodding. “I understand. And if I have to flay that man alive to have my instructions followed, I will. We do not need a wilder on a killing rampage.”
“Leave him in peace and I think it’ll be okay.” The adrenaline was fading now, and weariness dragged at me. Up before dawn, then reading Julian, then having my world flipped on its head, then this. Forward momentum was the only thing keeping me together and on my feet, and it was almost gone. Once I told Grayson about Falcon, then I could go home for a panic attack or sleep, whichever won.
So I gathered my frayed nerves and held back from the rest as they headed for the door. “Professor Grayson, could we speak with you for a moment?”
Liesel heard me and stopped, but a slight shake of Robert’s head sent her on. She’d have plenty of questions later, I was sure. “Certainly, Kimberly,” Grayson said. “Come with me; you’ll both need some food after that effort.” We followed her through the hospital. Five minutes later, all three of us were supplied with fruit drinks and granola bars, and we settled down in a deserted waiting room.
“Now, what did you want to discuss?” Grayson asked.
I glanced around. No one in sight, and this wasn’t a high-traffic area. We might as well talk here as anywhere. No place was right for this kind of bombshell. “I know what happened to Julian.”
Grayson leaned back in her plastic chair, eyebrows raised. “All right. I’m listening.”
Robert watched me as I opened and shut my mouth a few times. Damn him; this wasn’t easy. The bald truth would be best, but it took me three tries before I could say it. “He was attacked by the sidhe. The Otherworld is returning.”
Silence. In the distance I could hear a faint beeping and the rattle of a gurney. Grayson’s face was completely expressionless.
“Go on,” she said at last.
Go on? That was all? The woman was unreal. “I guess I should start at the beginning.” I took a deep breath, than plunged into the story, from Samhain onward. Grayson let me recite it in my own time, watching me without moving. One disappearance after another; I filled in the holes as best I could, explaining what the Unseelie had done, and how the Seelie had counteracted it. “You remember me saying someone else helped him—that was them. They freed him, and brought him back here.”
She might have been suspicious, disbelieving, astonished, hungry. I couldn’t read anything from her dark face or eyes, and she let as little slip empathically as Julian did. “So how did you learn this?
You didn’t know any of it when you were here earlier.”
“No, I didn’t.” I took another deep breath. Almost done. My voice shook when I told her about Falcon, and Robert shifted as if he wanted to lend moral support but didn’t know how. “On Samhain, they became able to touch our world, though only a little,” I finished. “According to him, on the solstice the way will open fully, and this won’t just be Welton’s problem any more.”
There. I’d said it all, and now the problem was in Grayson’s hands.
She closed her eyes, sitting perfectly still. Robert and I glanced at each other, then back at her.
“And they say First Manifestation almost destroyed the world,” she whispered.
I hadn’t even thought that far. There wouldn’t be the chaos of out-of-control gifts—at least I hoped not—but those had only accounted for some of the deaths; many others were lynchings, baselines lashing out at bloods, the source of their problems. One half of the world trying to murder the other. Would we band together against the Unseelie, or rip ourselves apart again?
Shit. I hadn’t explained that part.
“Falcon said he came to warn us, too,” I added. “He didn’t know what the Unseelie had been trying to do to Julian, but he said they want to use us against the Seelie. And he said we’d better find a way to stop them, fast, or we’d find ourselves their slaves.”
“I see,” Grayson said. Her eyes were open now, but she wasn’t looking at me. “Did he say anything else?”
My mind skimmed through the conversation. “He’s coming back. I don’t know when exactly, but he said they—the Seelie—would want to know how Julian was doing.”
Grayson was motionless, staring off into space. I fought the urge to wave one hand in front of her eyes to break her trance.
“Very well,” she said at last. “Go home and rest.”
Both Robert and I stared at her. “That’s it?” he asked in astonishment. “Nothing more?”
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