by Kim Harrison
Nina’s steps slowed to a stop, and when Trent continued on, I rocked into motion, respecting her need to be alone. Three more steps, and Trent came along my side. He looked like a businessman on holiday with his briefcase and shiny shoes peeping out from under his slacks. A pinch of worry marred his attempt at a smile, and I slipped my arm around his waist as we crossed the footbridge. I slowed, wondering if Sharps was around. He’d been a big help last time. But the ripples on the surface were only from the wind and current, and tension began to wind its way up my spine and give me a softly throbbing headache.
“I think I’m going to puke at all this sweetness,” Jenks muttered, and I tossed my hair to get him to leave. I didn’t care anymore who saw us together, but Trent was tense.
“You’ve done this before,” I said, thinking he was stressing about the charm. “No sweat.”
“Your soul wanted to be saved,” he said as our steps became one at the apex of the bridge. “You gave me permission to take it. I doubt that is what’s going to happen here.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “It has a containment circle, right? Then all we need to do is lure him into it.”
He nodded, but he still didn’t look convinced.
“Hey, ah, Rache?” Jenks said, dropping down in a column of gray dust. “We’ve got company.”
Bis whistled from twenty feet up, pointing at two cars roaring into the park, one at either end to block anyone from going in or out. Cormel’s vampire thugs had turned, shouting at them as, like a clown car, the vehicles began to empty of more men than could possibly have fit in there. All of them looked eager for a fight—all of them were headed our way.
“How dare they . . . ,” Nina whispered, her hiss making my skin crawl.
Trent slowed, his gaze on the footbridge and Al’s line beyond it. “I don’t think those are Cormel’s people,” he murmured.
“Hang close, Jenks,” I said, and he alighted on my shoulder. Everyone had slowed, the original vampire guards making a front at the base of the bridge. I didn’t like that half of the second group was jogging around the small lake to encircle us. Worried, I scanned for Bis. “Come on. Let’s get into the line before they make it around the pond.”
Trent nodded. What did they think I was doing out here? Having a picnic? “Stop her!” one shouted. “She’s almost at the line!”
Okay. That was enough for me, and I grabbed Trent’s elbow to run for it. Nina, though, had turned to face them, shaking in anger.
“You fools!” she shouted, feet spread wide. “She isn’t fleeing. She could have done that from her church. Interfere, and Cormel himself will tear his revenge from your skin!”
“We don’t work for Cormel,” one shouted back, and I heard a crack as someone broke a tree branch for a makeshift club. “Stay out of that line, Morgan, or Ivy dies!”
Suddenly it was making a lot more sense. Great. We were right in the middle of a freaking vamp war. Apparently Trent wasn’t the only one who thought giving the undead their souls might be a bad thing. “Come on,” I whispered, tugging at him. “We have to get into the line.”
“And I thought the press was bad,” Trent muttered as he started to jog beside me. “What is the line doing over there? I thought the tail of it was in the water.”
I flushed, looking up for Jenks. “I accidentally moved it.”
“You moved it? How?”
“By accident,” I said again, not wanting to talk about it. “Nina!” I shouted. “If you’re coming with us, let’s go!”
The soft give of the grass became the hard thump of concrete, and I spun as the warmth of the line cascaded over me. Trent slid to a halt beside me, eyes bright and a smile lifting his lips. Nina was slower, backing up as she glared at the vampires jogging to a slow stop before us. Bis landed on the statue of Romulus and Remus. At the bridge, a pitched fight had broken out, but some were wading across the shallow pond to join the few who’d run around it.
“Don’t do it, Morgan,” a vampire threatened, dripping from the pond and stinking.
More cars were driving up, angled to light the brawl with their headlights. This was going to either make the international news or be buried so deep the lost-dog-found would get more hits. Nervous, I looked at Trent on my right, then Nina on my left, her eyes a worrisome black. I quashed the sudden fear that she might betray us all. We were in the line. The vampires hung back a safe eight feet, but that wouldn’t last. I didn’t care if getting their souls back would kill them or not.
“Can you get there yourself?” I whispered to Trent, and he nodded. He had shifted realities before, and that’s all he had to do, not jump to an entirely new line. “Good. Bis, you’ve got Jenks. I’ll take Nina. Now!”
“What? Wait!” Nina shouted as I grabbed her arm and shifted her aura to that of the line.
“No!” I heard someone shriek, but it was too late, and their cry of outrage rose, echoed, and vanished. The rank smell of burnt amber filled me on my next breath.
“Let go!” Nina exclaimed, tugging away, and Trent coughed. We’d made it.
Hand over her face, Nina squinted into the dusky night as the gritty wind lifted her hair. Bis hunched on a rock, and Jenks darted into my hair, muttering about pixy piss and bloody daisies. The light was dim and red, and it put an unreal haze to everything as it reflected the early night sky. The scorch marks from our fight earlier looked like wounds.
Trent spun around at the clink of a rock, and my pulse thundered at the glowing eyes peering at us from the dark. A second set of eyes joined the first. They had found us already?
“Oh, this is much better!” Jenks snarled from beside my ear. “God, it’s going to take me forever to get the stink out of my clothes. Remind me again of why I wanted to come?”
Immediately Trent knelt and used his hand to smooth a place to spell in. There was another shifting of rock, and Nina spun, eyes becoming black. The bluster she’d shown with the vampires was gone. It was a sucky way to live, never knowing if what you felt was real and if you could back your words up, or if you were about to find yourself pinned to the floor and your neck ripped out by someone stronger than you.
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” Jenks grumbled. “Save the world, blah, blah, blah.”
“Bis?” I asked, and he took to the air in a single downward thrust.
“On it!” he called out cheerfully, and still grumbling, Jenks went with him. There might be two surface demons here, or there might be twenty. Bis and Jenks could find out.
“I’m going to set a perimeter circle,” I whispered to Trent, and he nodded, his expression grim as he used a silver knife to carefully scrape a six-foot spiral into the ragged earth. I strained to hear any sound as I moved to the outskirts and used the heel of my foot to make a shallow groove enclosing both Trent’s spiral and the rock that Nina had her back against. I didn’t set it, concerned that Al would feel it and show up like last time—not with Trent here.
My skin prickled. Trent’s magic was beginning to rise. Face pale, he backed away from his finished spiral. His soft chanting tugged at the recesses of my mind, and I steeled myself against the lure, shivering as the chill of the night seemed to cut right through me.
Uneasy, I hastened back to Nina and set my shoulder bag down beside her. “You think Felix’s soul is still nearby?” I said as I scanned the horizon.
Neither Trent nor Nina answered me. Trent was fumbling to put his cap on, his red-stained fingers leaving marks everywhere. Lips moving in a silent prayer, he put his ribbon about his neck. Seeing him, I was amazed again at his mix of professional businessman and magic user. His motions were quick and decisive, but there was a new solemn thread to his every action that screamed his belief in the Goddess. It was no longer a game of pretend. He believed, and it made his magic stronger than a demon’s, and more variable than a dandelion tuft in the wind—dangerous and unreliable.
“What if he’s gone?” Nina said, and we all jerked as a tiny pebble rolled almost to our feet. From the tufts
of grass, eyes showed. A silhouette rose, ragged, as if he wasn’t real. My breath quickened as I felt Trent pull more heavily on the line and the spiral glowed to make a puddle of green light. The glow stretched all the way to the surface demon, seeming to shred the first layer of reality from it to expose the spirit it really was.
I reached behind me for the solid feel of the rock as Trent’s magic pulled at me. It was a call to go home. I’d been there once, vulnerable to its summons.
Scared, I looked up at the black dome the sky made. “Bis? Jenks!” I shouted.
“I don’t think that’s Felix,” Nina said, and I agreed. The hatred shining from the dark was too deep, too enduring. But he was someone. Cormel, maybe? Luke’s master? Ivy’s mother? They weren’t demons, they were lost souls, shoved into the hell of the demons’ making until the body died and mind and soul became one again.
Oh God. Don’t let me do anything stupid.
Stepping carefully to not touch his spiral, Trent set a thumb-size bottle at the very center, upside down and still stoppered with a black wax. A faint glow raced from it to fill the spiral. Nina gasped, and I winced at the almost unheard whine. It set the bones in my ears vibrating. It was coming from the spiral itself, waves of glowing light pulsating from it like the heart of creation.
Even more carefully, Trent backed out.
“Ah, it’s working,” I said as more eyes showed, rising up from the grass like lions.
Crouching, Trent touched the red-drawn circle around the spiral, and a not-there shimmer seemed to rise straight up, not arching closed to make a dome but making a perfect column with the spiral glowing within it. It was his containment field, and the ache between my ears grew.
“Nina,” he said, hair falling into his face and a glow about his hands that made him look nothing like himself. “Once he shows, lure him into the spiral. You can pass in and out of it, but don’t touch any of the lines. The spell should ignore you, even if you touch the spiral, but no need to take chances. Once the surface demon touches any part of the spiral, he’ll have no recourse but to walk it. That will force his essence into the bottle.”
Is this how he captured my soul? I wondered, a faint memory of chant chilling me.
“Are you sure?” she warbled, clearly ready to break.
“Pretty sure.”
I looked at the glowing eyes inching closer, my unease growing. We’d come into this knowing what to do, but not what would happen. Trent’s magic was attracting every surface demon within a hundred miles. “Trent, how can I help here?” I asked, and Nina made a hopeless cry of despair.
Something dangerous plinked through me as our eyes met. He could sing souls to him, mine included, and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. “Keep the rest off us,” he said, words having an odd cadence, not quite chanting, but oh so close, and it pulled at me. “I don’t like what your aura looks like. Stay out of the column,” he added, then more sharply, “Nina! On your right!”
The woman shrank away, hand to her mouth as a surface demon edged in, emboldened by the others behind him. I could hear them creeping closer, and I itched to invoke the outer protection circle. “Jenks!” I shouted, searching for the sound of wings. “Talk to me!”
But the surface demon had hesitated, his eyes fixed on Nina. “Try holding out your hand,” I suggested, and she shook her head, eyes almost entirely black as she retreated.
“That’s not him,” she whispered.
I turned to Trent for his opinion, and in that instant—the surface demon moved.
Nina shrieked. Adrenaline slammed through me. I jerked Nina out of the way, my other hand extended toward the slavering soul coming at us. “Detrudo!” I shouted, locking my knees against the surge of power.
The surface demon skidded to a halt, but my magic caught him square in the chest, bowling him back into the darkness in a flurry of long bare limbs and tattered clothes.
Shit. “Trent!” I shouted, feeling his chant rising through me. “There’re too many of them!”
“Look!” Nina screamed, pointing at the dark.
I couldn’t see crap. Jenks and Bis were still AWOL, and frustrated, I made a fist and pointed it at the sky. “Leno cinis!” I shouted, funneling a crapload of energy through me and into the faintest imagined circle above us. A burst of amber-tinted light lit the entire area in a flash.
Nina cowered as the surface demons hid from the light. I didn’t want to invoke the perimeter circle unless I had to, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the grass rustled like dead cornstalks on All Hallows’ Eve as they faded back. But they didn’t go far.
“I don’t think he’s here,” I said softly, not wanting to interrupt Trent’s chanting.
I turned, lips parting as I saw him crouched before his circle, the amber light from my slowly drifting spell making him look covered in old blood. A memory of seeing Al like this flashed over me, shaking me.
Shit, what am I doing getting Trent involved in this?
Nina cried out in fear, and I spun. But it was only Bis and Jenks, and I yanked the energy from a rising spell back, feeling it burn as I dissolved the outer edges and it collapsed.
“Do what you need to do and be quick,” the pixy said, then did a double take at Trent, still chanting. “It’s like someone yelled free lunch.”
And we’re the entrée, I thought, flicking the mostly spent charm at the circling demons.
“How do you know you’re not chasing Felix away?” Jenks said.
My lips pressed tight. “I don’t.” Frustrated, I watched two surface demons skulk closer. Maybe Trent should tamp down his siren song a little. But then my eyes narrowed as they stopped just outside my easy magical reach. I turned to the right, seeing five more doing the same. Three were to the left, but more were coming up to fill in the blanks. Crap on toast, they were staying exactly out of my range. That’s why the first had been so bold. They’d been learning my reach. Toast. We were toast.
Concerned, I edged to Trent, hesitating when his pull on my soul became . . . tantalizingly alluring, whispering of peace and contentment.
“Trent,” I whispered, attention riveted by the glowing spiral, but he was deep into his spell. “Trent!” I said louder, nudging his foot. I didn’t want to interrupt, but we had enough souls to choose from now. “They know my reach,” I said, feeling as if we’d just left this scene in reality with the vampires. “Can you tone it down a little?” This had been a mistake. I never should have involved Trent. Newt said the Goddess couldn’t hear me. I should have done this myself.
Jenks’s dust shifted to an ugly black. “They’re focusing on Nina,” he whispered, and the vampire paled.
“You noticed that, too?” I muttered, then flung up a hand when five rushed us from three different directions. “Get down!” I shouted. Nina shrieked, and I threw wads of unfocused energy at them. Again arms and legs flailed as they were blown back, and I spun, making sure no one was sneaking up behind us. They were testing me, and my heart pounded.
“Rachel!” Bis shouted, and I whirled back around.
“No!” Trent exclaimed. His chanting cut off and pain iced through my head as something I hadn’t know was there was suddenly ripped away with his voice. I gasped, stunned and dizzy, unable to react as Nina was dragged screaming into the darkness. Jenks and Bis were slowing their progress, and when one let go to swing at Bis, Nina fought back, bucking and twisting until she got free. Sobbing, she lurched back to me.
Trent’s spell had sunk deeper into me than I’d realized, and my pulse thundered as I pulled heavily on the line. “Trent! Fire in the hole!” I shouted as I threw a wad of energy straight up. “Dilatare!” I exclaimed, exploding it with a twist of my wrist. Surface demons went flying. Nina pressed into the ground, her desperate clawing motion to get back to me never stopping.
Eyes alight, I pulled myself straight. “Rhombus!” I shouted as I set the outer circle. Satisfied we’d have a moment, I reached to help Nina stand.
Face grim with anger, she loo
ked up at me, her expression shocked, and changing to fear as she snatched her outstretched hand away, her eyes wide and black.
My heart pounded, and then I was on the dirt, choking as the dust of the ever-after blinded me. Something . . . was on me. Pain jerked through my scalp, and I fought to breathe as bands of steel wrapped around my neck. Sinewy brown arms pinched me to the earth. Thin wiry fingers choked my throat closed.
Panicked, I spun the line through me. The demon howled like a desert wind, but he hung on, even as his skin peeled back and began to char. I could feel the vampire soul soaking into me, trying to take over my body, to merge his soul with mine. Trent’s chanting swirled through both our thoughts, making the edges blur where normally they couldn’t touch.
“Enough!” Nina raged, her demand a harsh whip.
The fingers around my neck sprang away and I gasped, rolling prostrate as I coughed and felt my neck. The line I’d used to try to burn the demon from me hummed through my synapses, scorching my brain and making every motion hurt. My heart thundered, and every pulse sent needles through my fingers. I got a clean breath in and shoved the line back into the earth as I exhaled in a half sob. It was gone. The demon was gone. I was still myself, but I could feel its alien nature on me, like red dust I had to wash off.
Gritty tears blurred my eyes as I looked up in the fading light from my charm. Nina stood over me, wisps of hair from the demon she’d pulled off me still in her fist. Trent was behind her, white faced. The demon Nina had flung into the rock beside him slid, unmoving, to the earth.
Had she killed a soul? Was that even possible?
“You will not!” Nina raged, spinning a tight circle in warning, finger crooked, all angles and ugliness. It was Felix. Nina had broken and Felix had slipped into her, freeing her from fear, from any thought at all. “You will not because I say so. She is mine!”
Not sure if he meant me or Nina, I sat up, glad the surface demons had withdrawn to an unsettling twenty feet back, their eyes glowing and blinking. Nina’s lips were pulled back, her posture ugly with her feet spread wide and her head at a weird angle so she could see the sky and earth at the same time.