Dark Prism

by Cherry Adair

  Sara realized she was freezing and rubbed her arms through the soft fabric of her jacket. “So Trace-teleport and follow them,” she suggested. This was crazy. She tried to dredge up what her mother had told her, but it had been so long ago. All she remembered was that it had something to do with snakes, and that the stories were deliciously scary. To this day, she loved scary movies, and even scarier books. Her imagination filled in the blank spaces between the printed words. That kind of fear didn’t come close to the chill she felt watching these two powerful wizards discuss the end of the world.

  “The way an Omnivatic travels to his nest is through a portal, so Trace-teleporting isn’t an option. And before you ask, Miss Temple, we don’t know where or what such a portal might be, either.” The Head of Council sat down in the chair behind him. “Nobody has seen an Omnivatic in hundreds of years.”

  “Are you telling us the world will end if you don’t find a way to stop these Omnivatics in—”

  “If we, Miss Temple”—he motioned to her and Jack—“if we don’t stop them, and yes, that’s what I’m telling you. They have the ability to speed the rotation of the Earth. Every earthquake the Omnivatics have caused over millions of years has permanently shortened the time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation, thereby shortening the length of a day. One of the Archon’s jobs was to reverse, or at least slow down, that process. The advent of the comet will make the Earth rotate even faster, by nudging some of its mass closer to the planet’s axis. They must be stopped. Especially now that their powers are increasing. A couple of weeks is how much time we have.”

  “How are they amassing power?” Jack asked.

  “The first step would be to lethally infect their victims—powerful wizards—and drain their powers. With each transfer, they become exponentially stronger themselves. That’s what happened to the wizards who died.”

  “There are wizards capable of doing power transference. Doesn’t mean they’re Omnivatics.”

  “True. But this is considerably more than a simple power transference. Apparently this ‘sickness’ is a slow, agonizingly painful process. Not only are the powers transferred to the Omnivatic, but so are the victims’ thoughts and experiences. Their memories are assimilated with their powers.”

  “Hell.”

  “Yeah. It is for the poor bastards being targeted.”

  “But, according to Sara, Santos didn’t have any extraordinary powers. And his memories of being a chef don’t exactly make him a prime target either.”

  “Clearly,” said Edge flatly, “we don’t have all the answers. Maybe we never will. What we do know is the trajectory and strength of the incoming comet. We know the devastation its proximity will cause.”

  “I get the magnitude of the situation, and I’ll do what I can to help until another Archon is formed, but this has nothing to do with Sara or myself. Why call us in?”

  “You two never had a telepathic connection, yet you heard her in Australia. Separately, you couldn’t use magic on Santos, yet when you touched and used your power together, you were able to teleport him. Didn’t you ask yourselves why that should be?”

  “No,” Jack retorted mildly. “We haven’t exactly had time to sit and reflect. But it’s an interesting change of subject, Edge.”

  “Actually, it’s not. Because you, Slater, are full Aequitas, and Miss Temple is half Aequitas. We’re not sure why, perhaps because you are Lifemates as well as Aequitas, you have a unique connection. Your powers are amped because of this.”

  “It’s never happened before.”

  “And we aren’t Lifemates,” Sara added, keeping her tone as even as possible. She wanted to leave now. The conversation scared her to death. She wanted to be far, far away from both the head of the Wizard Council and Jackson Slater. She wanted to go back to her normal life, where Jack was just a name and her biggest worry was matching two shades of blue.

  “The Omnivatics weren’t involved before. That changes everything.” Edge paused, looking critically at both of them in a way that made Sara squirm. “Slater. Tell Miss Temple what the Omnivatics were known for.”

  “Geophysical realm,” Jack said as if he were quoting from something, “earthquake, tsunami, and volcanic activity. Meteorological: storms. Hydrological: floods. Climatological: extreme temperature, drought, and wildfire.” Far from sounding terrified, he actually sounded stoked. “Jesus …” Jack muttered, clearly as fascinated as he was appalled. “The snowstorms across a large part of North America? Worst in more than forty years. Hurricanes—”

  “It took hurricanes Andrew and Katrina before we were alerted to the possibility that the Omnivatics were involved. Fortunately, with quick action, we were able to subdue Hurricane Ike before it made landfall. It hit at a Category Three in Cuba instead of the Five it was supposed to be. Still, it killed several hundred people and cost upward of thirty billion dollars in damages.

  “Lest you dismiss all this as a string of coincidences, 2008 was a record year for natural disasters, as you know from your geological reports, Slater.”

  “More than two million fatalities worldwide from cyclones, earthquakes, floods, and other forces of nature. Yeah. Unprecedented.”

  Of course he’d known what was happening, but he’d never put it all together this way. Unprecedented wasn’t the half of it. “This is Omnivatic interference on a grand scale.”

  “What do they want?” Sara asked, confused. She hadn’t studied this as Jack had.

  “World domination and the eradication of the Aequitas. And that can only happen if they eliminate wizards and drain their powers to amass the strength they need in time.”

  “I don’t get it.” She had fought back her fear—being irritated by the whole Lifemate issue helped considerably—and was, to say the least, skeptical. “They think they can dominate the world by killing wizards one at a time?”

  “They’re doing it to amass power. We don’t know how many they’ve killed so far. What we do know is that before their deaths, at least nine wizards have had their magic stripped from them. All nine were from the South American continent.”

  “It’s a big place,” Jack pointed out. “Let me play devil’s advocate here for a minute. A handful of wizards dying isn’t that unusual, surely?”

  “It is when they have their powers leeched. You were in Ecuador a couple of years ago, right, Slater?” Edge asked.

  “Yeah. Quito. Guagua Pichincha erupted. I was also in Banjos just after Tungurahua erupted. But the country has almost three hundred volcanoes, twenty of them active. Do you believe these ‘natural disasters’ were caused by the Omnivatics?”

  “We do. Unnatural ‘natural’ disasters are the Omnivatics’ stock in trade. The Aequitas preserve the balance, Omnivatics destroy it.”

  Edge settled against the back of his chair, a greenish fire crackling between his fingertips, which he then turned into a sphere the size of a tennis ball that slowly rotated in his palm. “Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if humans knew that in days a battle will be waged between good and evil?”

  The tension in Jack’s body made the fear in Sara’s ratchet up another notch. He was a geologist. He spent his life studying such disasters, and he believed what Edge was telling him.

  Jack started thinking out loud, analyzing information in the way he excelled at. “The bombardment of tropical cyclones, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia.” Jack rose and stood in front of his chair, too involved to stay still.

  Sara, on the other hand, felt as though she’d been Krazy Glued right there. Icy cold filled her insides, making the conversation between the two men muted and surreal. She usually had an opinion on something, on everything—but today she was rendered practically speechless by the enormity of what she was hearing.

  “Damn them to hell. That seven-point-nine-magnitude earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan province could have been prevented.”

  The green fire snapped out, and Edge’s eyes narrowed. “If we’d known ab
out it in time, and if the Archon had intervened? Yes, it could have. The occurrences are escalating.”

  “If you’ll give me what you have, I’ll look into this for you.”

  “Investigate.”

  After a second, Jack nodded. “I have a couple of other geologists I can bring in to—”

  “You’re a man of science, Slater. Let’s look at the facts. You and Miss Temple have a bond. The dead wizards have all been infected on the west coast of South America—where Miss Temple currently resides. You each have your powers amped by close proximity to the other. And together you have the strength to fight the Omnivatics because you’re both Aequitas. I don’t believe in coincidences. Do you?”

  Sara found her voice. “Could it be something else? Anything else?” Was it really possible that all those horrific disasters were caused by the Omnivatics?

  “You might wish it were, but it isn’t. The Omnivatics are back. You are to work together investigating these events.”

  “No!” Sara and Jack said simultaneously, with exactly the same emphasis.

  Jack kept going. “Out of the question. I won’t work with her. You require that I use my skills as a geologist and an Aequitas to investigate a common thread in these natural disasters? Sure.” He ran his hand over his face. “Sara’s not qualified for this sort of investigation, Edge, you know that. You need a medical doctor—hell, you need a team from the CDC, more scientists, more geologists, not an interior designer who has made a point of not using what powers she has.”

  “And we’re putting that team together. Unfortunately, our only member of the Aequitas Archon is dead, and this can only be done by an Aequitas. It’s not as though every Aequitas in the country is registered with the Wizard Council. Going through the remaining records of the Archon will take time—time we don’t have. In the meantime, you two are it.” Orange and blue flames leapt across the fabric of Edge’s robe close to his face. His eyes glowed demonically red.

  Jack leaned forward, everything about him on the defensive from the line of his shoulders to the jut of his scruffy jaw. “My call.”

  He and Duncan Edge faced off.

  The hair on Sara’s nape and arms rose with the electrical power surging through the room. Her heart skipped a couple of beats.

  “Not your call, Slater.” Edge’s grim expression was more eloquent than his words. “Until another Archon is formed and says differently, the two of you will work together. I don’t want you out of each other’s sight—literally—for the duration. Go back to San Cristóbal, and report back to us if this problem has spread. See if you can figure out how it’s contracted. Until we understand what this is and how to contain it, you two will be our eyes and ears.”

  “Get someone else to team up with me,” Jack suggested, his voice tight and hard. “What about the counterterrorist guys you used to work for? They have a psi division.”

  “I have no say over the psi division of T-FLAC. And since you’re Aequitas, you’re the only ones who can do the job—in this instance, even T-FLAC’s paranormal division would be useless. Not to mention that we don’t believe what’s happening in South America has anything to do with terrorists,” Duncan Edge pointed out dryly. “The counterbalance of the Omnivatics is Aequitas. You are both Aequitas. I can assure you that the Wizard Council will expedite the search for more Aequitas as swiftly as possible. That said, it’s clear that you two have something I doubt we’ll find in another Aequitas—your ability to amp each other’s powers.”

  “You don’t know that,” Jack said boldly. “There could be any number of Aequitas out there who can perform the same power surge when they’re together,”

  “Possibly. Probably. But we don’t know who or where they are. They aren’t currently sitting in my council chambers. Look, Slater, Miss Temple—the Wizard Council doesn’t exactly have a task force ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice, not with the Archon gone.”

  “Then form another Archon,” Sara told him flatly, standing up and leaning forward in unconscious imitation of Jack.

  “Not possible in such a short time, Miss Temple.”

  “As much as he doesn’t want to work with me, I don’t want to work with him. I do agree with Jackson on something else: I’m not qualified for this. I didn’t go to wizard school, and even though my parents were wizards, I was raised human.”

  “And have centuries of Aequitas blood flowing through your veins. You two don’t get it.” The Master Wizard rose, his robes flowing around him like black-and-silver liquid. Angry, spiked flames danced around his body and head as he braced both hands on the desk in front of him; Sara could feel his heat.

  “Your powers are amped when you’re together, and together you need to be for the duration. This is not a matter of national security. This is bigger. This is the planet we’re talking about. If we don’t stop the Omnivatics, the natural disasters will become bigger and more destructive. Civilization as we know it will be completely destroyed, leaving the field clear for absolute domination by the Omnivatics. You’re Aequitas, the protectors of humans and of this world. Consider yourself deputized. End of discussion!”

  “May I respectfully remind you,” Sara said, raising her chin and looking straight into Edge’s inscrutable eyes, “I do not work for you, or for the Wizard Council. I don’t know anything about being an Aequitas. And I’m not comfortable with you invoking some arcane law that hasn’t been used in hundreds of yea—”

  Chapter Five

  “—rs!” Sara finished on a high note, blinking to orient herself as they materialized.

  They were no longer in the plush Wizard Council chamber, but in a sun-washed office. Jack knew it had to be Sara’s, back at Baltzer’s hacienda in San Cristóbal, because no matter where in the world she was, her offices were always identical. All of the furniture and accessories were creams, beiges, and black. There was an intentional lack of color in her primary work space.

  She grabbed the high back of her black mesh desk chair to maintain her balance. “They’re certainly theatrical.”

  But real. Fucking, horrifically real. And they both knew it. If she was hoping he’d tell her otherwise, Sara was in for a giant fucking disappointment. “If all twelve members of the Aequitas Archon were killed as Edge claims, then we’re in deep, and I mean fucking deep, shit.”

  “I don’t think he made that up,” Sara said dryly, pressing her fingertips to the middle of her forehead.

  Jack rested his butt on her desk and stretched out his legs, crossing his ankles in a relaxed posture that in no way reflected the myriad of facts flipping through his mind as he tried to come up with a cohesive plan. “No. No reason to lie.”

  Dropping her hand, she shot him a disbelieving look. “Everybody has reason to lie at some point. Although I tried to tell him he chose poorly. Oh, not in you—you can at least try to put some of the pieces together. But me? I don’t even call myself a wizard.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you call yourself. You are one. It’s not as though you have no magic. It’s your choice—always has been—not to use it.”

  “I don’t want to do this, Jack. What does the Wizard Council gain by forcing us to deal with this?”

  Jack shrugged. “Nothing, as far as I can see. I imagine we aren’t the only people who’ve been deputized to look into this.”

  “Good,” she sighed, clearly relieved they weren’t on their own. “Then what are you going to do about their insane request?”

  “Request? In case you didn’t notice, that was an order. Go your merry way, Sara. Do whatever you were doing before. I’ll do what I was told to do—look into the situation and report back. In the meantime, you have a houseguest for a few days.” Jack maintained his temper by a hair. He didn’t like this togetherness any more than she did.

  “Grant hates you, and I’m perfectly aware that the feeling’s mutual.” She turned to give Jack a fix-this-damn-it glare. “He won’t be happy playing host to you.” Her tone implied she wouldn’t either.

>   Jack raised a mocking brow. “A hotelier not willing to rent a room?”

  “This is Grant’s home. Damn it, Jackson, I’d almost prefer world catastrophe to living under the same roof as you.” She closed her eyes wearily and shook her head. “Okay, that was ridiculous, but you know what I mean. Can’t you stay at a hotel?”

  “Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other. At least until the Council pulls together a task force.”

  “Don’t they care that I’m not qualified to do this?” Sara paced, ignoring the tempting view of a sparkling swimming pool outside her window. Her usually muted office was an explosion of color swatches and chaos. She’d clearly been in the middle of a large project when this business with Santos occurred. The mess had to be some sort of release valve to Sara’s uptight nature. Jack scratched his chin, eying the wallpaper and fabric sample books littering every surface, a drafting table that held a blueprint, and several bulletin boards covered with paint and fabric swatches and notes. Sara skirted an enormous basket holding rolled blueprints and an umbrella; he’d lay ten-to-one odds that she’d completely forgotten putting the umbrella in there.

  Jack leaned against her desk. “They think we are.”

  “They’re wrong.”

  “Given what we know, yeah. Maybe. But I suspect that they didn’t tell us everything.”

  “Great. So they throw two unprepared, unqualified, unwilling people into a life-or-death situation blindfolded. That’s insane.”

  He was neither unprepared nor unqualified. “It’s what Aequitas does.”

  “Too bad I didn’t get the handbook.”

  “You chose not to learn, Sara. You can hardly blame the Council for that.”

  She stopped and glared at him. “They should respect that I have no interest in embracing my power. I resent being called to arms because of some archaic pledge and an accident of my bloodline. I don’t want to do this. I particularly don’t want to do it with you. I don’t think I can be much plainer than that.”