by Karen Chance
I hung over the side of the car, staring down at the ocean and the huge head that bobbed for a moment among the iron-gray waves and then disappeared. We continued upward for another few seconds and then started to drop like the large hunk of steel we were. I kept waiting for another line to snatch us away, but nothing happened and the waves were close enough that I could see the foam cresting on them and—
We fell into a brilliant purple line and rocketed forward just over the top of the waves. “Can’t we slow down?” I yelled.
Marsden shook his head, his wild white mane flowing out behind him. “Have to pick up speed. There’s some skipping ahead.”
Pritkin made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper, and I clutched Marsden’s shoulder. “Skipping?”
“Yes, like a rock over a pond. Ah, here we go,” he said, and the next second we were sailing into thin air again. I was hit in the face with some spray before I could point out that iron cars do not float, and then we were crashing in another line—yellow—which we stayed in for barely a heartbeat before launching into the air and hitting a deep purple line. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds.
“You see, skipping,” Marsden said happily.
I didn’t say anything; I was afraid I was going to throw up.
We left the purple line at the bottom of a bank of cliffs, twisting and tumbling through a very startled flock of seagulls and the smoking spray of waves, before merging with a bright blue line. That one headed straight inland—thank God—and Marsden patted my leg. “Almost there now.”
“Almost where?” I croaked as we leapt into thin air yet again.
I gazed dazedly at a rolling patchwork of yellow fields, and then we were dropping back into a silver-white ocean of the Belinus Line. But this time it was broken by the presence of a large dark mass extending almost completely across. “Barrier,” Pritkin said a little shrilly.
“Yes, thank you, John,” Marsden said, and spun the wheel. The car hit the side of the line, swooped up the side, and turned completely upside down. We skinned past the top of the barrier with maybe an inch to spare, and then we were rushing down the other side of the line, completing a graceful swoop that had my hands shaking and my stomach reeling. The barrier dissolved behind us as the mages hurried to catch up.
“How did they know we’d come back?” Pritkin asked as we hurtled ahead.
“One of them must be a racer,” Marsden said, looking irritated. “I laid out that course myself some years ago, and a number of the young hopefuls are known to practice on it. I should have taken an alternate route, but not to worry. We’ll lose them soon enough.”
He pointed ahead. I turned from watching our pursuers and a wash of color exploded across my vision. A firestorm of light boiled ahead, like a curtain of fire stretched across the entire center of the line. It was almost impossible to look directly at it. The power surges threatened to sear my retinas, the glow leaking in even through the hand I had thrown over my eyes.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” Pritkin said.
“A shortcut?” Why didn’t I like the sound of that?
“Yes. Try to relax, Cassie,” Marsden advised. I stared at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. Because despite the fact that he was gearing down, we appeared to be picking up speed as whatever that was pulled us in. And Marsden wasn’t trying to avoid it, I realized; he’d cut back on his suicidal pace only to better handle the wicked currents being churned up by that thing.
“What is that?”
“A minor vortex,” Pritkin informed me. He sounded tense.
“Minor?” The thing looked like a supernova. And then a more important thought intruded. “Wait. We’re going in there?”
“Oh, no. That would kill us,” Marsden said calmly. And then the phenomenon grabbed us and we were hurtling forward at what had to be a couple hundred miles an hour.
I screamed and grabbed Pritkin, who was trying to fire off spells even as we bucked and twisted and slingshotted around the outer edge of the phenomenon and then—
Dead calm. For a moment, we hung alongside the electric white hub of the vortex, energy pulsing around us like the heartbeat of some giant beast. And the next we were somewhere else entirely.
I’d had a shift go bad before, had the weight of time pressing down on me, stretching me, until it felt like my body spanned the width of the planet. This was nothing like that. There was no gravity pulling on me, no bones and cells warping, no anything. It was almost like being back inside the Shroud, except that that had just caused sensory deprivation. This was having no senses to deprive.
I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to overtake me, but I couldn’t even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, hear something, but if I had a hand it didn’t connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead—that something had gone terribly wrong and we would be left here, drowning in nothingness, forever.
Until I slammed back into the seat. I couldn’t complain of a lack of sensation now. In an instant, I went from having no secure casing of flesh and bone to a body made of pain. It was everywhere, from my throbbing head to my bruised butt to the sharp pain radiating up from my lap where the seat belt was doing its best to cut me in two.
But the pain wasn’t the main problem. I stared up in blank terror at a thousand lines of power crisscrossing all around us: vibrant greens and glowing golds, cold blues and rich silver, flowing ebony and shuddering, bloody reds. I could have traced the lines just as easily blind: the bronze clanging like a bell, the blue murmuring like a stream, the purple crackling like lightning, the reds screaming.
“We hopped over to Glastonbury Tor,” Pritkin explained, looking a little pale. “The biggest vortex in Britain.”
“Hopped?”
“For short trips, you take a ley line,” Marsden said. “If one happens to be running where you want to go. For longer ones, you take a line to the nearest major vortex. All vortexes around the world are interconnected on the metaphysical plane, you see, with currents flowing between them. If you catch the right one, you can hop from one vortex to another.”
I shook my head numbly.
“There is no space here,” he said, trying again, “Only energy. Therefore distance is meaningless.”
I stared around in awe at the streams of power running all around us, each threading through the middle of the massive vortex. This close, it was like a giant heart, the ley lines running in and out of it like brightly colored veins, energy pulsing around us with every strobing beat. Everywhere I looked, colors melted together, shimmering off everything, painting the car in a dozen hues. It looked like we were swimming in rainbow water.
If a small ley line sink could power MAGIC, what could something like this do? “Why doesn’t somebody harvest all this energy?” I asked wonderingly. “It could power . . . everything.”
“Every generation has those who try,” Marsden replied. “But no shield we’ve ever created can withstand the forces inside even a small vortex.” He looked me over critically. “Have you recovered? Because I am afraid we have another jump ahead of us.”
“Another one?” I said numbly. “Do they all hurt like that?”
“Not after you’ve done it a few times. The trick is to go limp.” He snapped his fingers and devil dog demonstrated by collapsing against my leg, his long tongue hanging out. “You see?”
“This time we shouldn’t have any pursuers, at least,” Pritkin added. “Individual shields aren’t strong enough to withstand the forces this close to the vortex. Our pursuers should not have been able to follow us—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because a dozen shapes popped out of nowhere, all huddled together in one big, dark blob.
“Unless they pooled their shields,” Marsden finished sourly, and threw the car back into gear.
Luckily for us, the trainees looked about as rattled as I felt. It gave us a slight lead, although a glance be
hind showed that some of them were already starting after us. Marsden suddenly jerked the steering wheel to the right and we roared into the middle of an apple green line. He waited until the mages had followed us and then threw the car into reverse.
We were free and back in the nothingness in the corona of the vortex for a moment, before that awful free-falling sensation took us again. And Marsden had lied, the bastard. Going limp didn’t help at all. And then we were racing through the middle of a world gone red. But it wasn’t the red of a ley line; it was the blinding dazzle of miles of sun-baked sand.
We hit down onto a black snake of asphalt with a jolt, a squeal of tires and a burst of speed. The dark shapes of war mages tumbled out onto the roadway after us—four, no, five—who had managed to keep up with the crazy ride. But they were on foot and we had wheels. Marsden left them in the dust.
We’d hopped to the Chaco Canyon vortex in New Mexico while I’d had my eyes closed. Half an hour later, we jumped to the shimmering blue line that ran through to Nevada and Dante’s. It didn’t take long from there to notice a big black blob on the horizon. It looked somewhat like the barrier the mages had constructed, except that there were no gaps around this one. There were other things, though.
Ragged flutterings of light darted here and there around the edges of my vision. I could glimpse them out of the corner of my eyes but could no longer see them directly. But even so, the sheer number was staggering. They looked like a crystal kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and changing all around us.
I looked back at Pritkin, and the expression on his face was enough to let me know I was right. “Rakshasas,” he murmured. I guess in that quantity, even my eyes could pick them out.
“Where?” Marsden demanded.
“Surrounding the ward. Thousands of them.”
“How did they know we were coming?” I asked, trying to ignore the chills that had sprung to the surface of my skin.
“They didn’t. And even if they had, two of us could never feed so many.” Pritkin gazed around in awe. “This is like the gathering before a great battle. When they expect a harvest of thousands . . .”
“Well, as long as they stay on the outside of the ward, we won’t have to worry about them much longer,” Marsden said, diving straight for it.
“What are you doing?” I screeched as a wall of darkness towered above us.
“The ward is spelled to let you in, is it not?”
“I don’t know!”
“We’ll soon find out,” he said as a swarm of black dots broke away from the base of the main structure. In a few seconds, they were close enough that I could identify them—war mages. It looked like Saunders’ men had called ahead.
Some of them came straight for us, while others stayed at the base of the ward, waiting for us to try to land, I assumed. Pritkin threw a spell that scattered the ones directly in front of us, but they re-formed almost at once and rocked the car with half a dozen spells. Devil dog whined and I sunk my fingers into his fur, either comforting him or holding on, I’m not sure which.
“Jonas—” Pritkin began.
“We’ll make it,” Marsden said calmly.
“Not if they hit us with another combined spell!”
“Yes, but to do that, they’ll have to catch us, won’t they?” The car sprang ahead, headed right for the black tower and the swarm of mages in front of it.
I didn’t care about them. At this speed, there wasn’t going to be anything left for them to attack. We were going to be splattered all over Dante’s ward like bugs on a windshield.
I clutched Marsden’s arm with nerveless fingers, silently begging him to turn around. He glanced at me and patted my hand fondly. “Where are you staying?”
“What?”
“Your room. Where is it?”
“The penthouse.”
“Oh, good,” he murmured, and we crashed straight into the wall of darkness.
I screamed, Pritkin swore and Marsden laughed, and then we were bursting out the other side, the ward dissolving like smoke in front of us.
It was still night at Dante’s, the moon hanging heavy and marmalade orange over the casino. I could see the color because we soared out of the line for ten seconds, leaving our pursuers behind, before we plunged back into the maelstrom of electric blue. Marsden had succeeded in confusing the hell out of the pursuers—an even dozen whisked by us, going up as we were heading back down. He’d done a pretty good job on me, too. I stared around blankly, not even sure we were still right side up.
And then I caught sight of the building rushing straight at us.
“Slow down!” I shrieked. “We’re going to crash!”
“Nonsense,” he told me, and plunged into the middle of a forest of other craft riding the currents of the ley line.
The interior of the ward was like a parking lot.We ducked under a tall clipper ship, its sails furled inside its bubble of protection, slid past a modern luxury yacht with lounge chairs scattered about the shining wood deck and swooped past a familiar dragon-shaped barge. It was the personal conveyance of the Chinese consul. I assumed the others belonged to her counterparts, something that wouldn’t have worried me except they were clustered around the wrong tower.
Mine.
“Oh, shit!”
“You can never get a parking space when you need one!” Marsden agreed just as a spell clipped our fender, spinning us straight at the balcony doors. I had a second to see a group of startled faces staring out at us, and then we were crashing through the windows, glass flying, bar stools soaring, couches splintering.
We slammed straight into the wall leading to the dining room but bounced off as if it had been made of rubber instead of wood and plaster. We spun back into the room, taking out a couple of potted plants and a cigar-store Indian in the process. The room was a blur of color and noise for a few confused seconds before we finally came to a stop beside the ruined sofas.
The antler chandelier swung wildly above us, slinging light everywhere. I clutched devil dog to my chest and glared at Marsden, who was grinning from ear to ear. “I thought you said we weren’t going to crash!”
He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “Just a little crash. And I do so enjoy making an entrance!”
Chapter Twenty-five
Mircea reached us first, pushing a pile of expensive kindling out of the way, heedless of damage to his sleek black suit. He wrenched open the door and devil dog growled menacingly, but Marsden got hold of the collar and pulled him back. “Now, now, Orion. You remember the good senator, surely.”
Mircea grabbed Pritkin and hauled him bodily out of the car, his eyes devouring Pritkin’s face with a nearly desperate relief. I blinked, taking a moment to catch up. And then it hit: Pritkin was still in my body. And that was definitely not something I wanted to explain.
“Crap.”
“If you find our company distasteful, Mage Pritkin, feel free to leave it!” Mircea said acidly.
Pritkin’s hand curled into a fist and he glared at me over Mircea’s shoulder as he was dragged into a bone-cracking embrace. I just shrugged. I thought he should have been grateful—at least Mircea hadn’t kissed him.
Marlowe approached, wearing modern clothes for once—a black shirt and tie with a dark russet suit that brought out auburn glints in his hair. He was waving a bottle of whiskey. “Can I interest anyone in a drink?”
Marsden peered at the label. “Glenfiddich? Oh, yes, please.” He climbed out, followed by devil dog, and surveyed the damage. “Not too bad,” he said musingly. “A new coat of paint and a bit of drying out, and she’ll be right as rain.”
“You modified it,” Pritkin accused.
“I added an external shield for landings that don’t, er, go quite as planned. It’s illegal in racing, but as I don’t do that anymore—”
“Could have fooled me,” I said shakily. I crawled out of the car and tried to take a couple of steps, but my balance was shot and the room swung crazily about me. My inner ears wer
en’t convinced that we’d actually stopped.
I looked around, expecting to see a ring of ancient, disapproving eyes. I did, but not the ones I’d feared. Besides the five of us, the only other people in the room were Mircea’s cold-eyed masters. It looked like the consuls had gone out for lunch.
One of the masters approached Mircea. “Sir, the representatives from the Circle have arrived.”
“Stall them,” he snapped, looking at Marsden.
The man bowed and exited, but Marsden just shook his head. “It’s too late for that, I’m afraid.”
“Cassie, may I see you a moment?” Mircea didn’t wait for a reply, just hauled Pritkin into the hall leading to the bedrooms, I guess for privacy. Thoughts of how well that was likely to go had me scrambling after them until Marlowe blocked my path.
He smiled. “Are you sure you won’t have a drink? You look like you could use it.”
“Maybe later,” I said, trying to hedge around.
He moved with me. “This is the last whole bottle left to us. I’d take advantage, if I were you.”
There was a curse from the hallway, followed by a grunt and a thud. I winced as Pritkin ran back into the room, face flushed and eyes livid. “Actually, I think a drink sounds like a good idea,” I said as Mircea followed.
“Cassie!” he hissed, his eyes on my face.
“Make that a double,” I told Marlowe before an angry vampire had me by the shoulders, fingers digging into my flesh.
“It’s not like we didn’t try to switch back!” I said defensively.
“You’re saying you can’t reverse this?”
“No, no! We totally can,” I promised quickly, because Mircea was looking a little stressed. “It’s just . . . well, the last time we tried, we sort of almost died and—”
Marlowe tried to hand me my drink, but Mircea took it instead and threw it back. “Ah,” Marlowe said, looking back and forth between Pritkin and me. “This is . . . disturbing.”