I was wasting time. I didn’t want to fail, and most of me thought that I would. Trace magic just wasn’t meant to be an active power. It was passive, the kind that waited for its prey to walk into it before it chomped. An alligator rather than a lion. Right now, I needed lion power.
You’re the strongest tracer in living history, as far as anybody else seems to know. If anybody can travel through their own trace, you can. I told myself this and kept repeating it in my head so that the piranha doubts couldn’t grab hold. I had to get out and stop Price. My family’s lives were at stake. Price’s life was at stake. Not to mention the FBI agents imprisoned in the building, and who knew how far the damage would go.
I summoned magic into me. Normally, I’d let it flow through, but this time I held it. Before long I got light-headed. My body felt fizzy, and tickling warmth swirled down my arms and legs and up through my head. I squinched my eyes shut as the carbonated feeling hit them. Not entirely comfortable.
The pressure built inside me. How much would I need? How much was too much? I decided to err on the side of blowing open a door versus not succeeding at all, and took as much as I could hold.
Now for the tricky part. Which is to say, the part where I played mad scientist and experimented in the hopes I got it right and didn’t kill myself in the backlash of failure. Or even success, for that matter.
I’d kept myself open to the trace. I felt the spirit dimension waiting just beyond. Could I send magic through my trace and somehow use it to pull myself inside? I focused on my trace ribbon and sent magic shooting down it. I wasn’t sure what I thought would happen. Like I said, mad-scientist time.
I braced myself. Nothing. The magic dissipated out along my trace, like pouring ink into water. I needed to anchor it somehow so that I could pull myself along. Could I flare it out somehow to catch on the edge of the spirit dimension, like a grapple? Though it seemed completely impossible to me, with nothing to lose, I tried anyway. I concentrated, pushing the flowing power to divide and spread. I put all my strength of will into my working. I about fainted when tendrils of power answered me, unwinding from each other and spreading out into trace space. My heart thudded.
I pushed the strands outward, trying to curl them into hooks. The result looked like tangled spaghetti. That wasn’t going to cut it. I focused on one of the tendrils, straightening and then curving it back on itself. By the time I was done, my entire body ached and I was sweating like a horse. Worse, the other four energy tendrils had returned to the flow. Fine. I only needed one good hook to dig in and hold.
I whirled it in a circle, feeding more energy into it to lengthen the line. I panted as holding the energy grew harder and harder. I felt myself shaking. Or maybe it was the rest of the world. The floor continued to buck and rear. I had no idea how much time had passed.
I scrunched my eyes tight and bit my lower lip. I clenched my whole body and strengthened my effort.
To no avail. I made a grunting sound of pure frustration. There had to be a way to get the fuck out of this cocoon. Think, Riley, think! If only I could grab hold of my trace—
Wait. My forehead furrowed. God, I was stupid. My trace was nothing more than a magical umbilical cord. It was anchored inside me, body and soul. I was always touching it. Travelling along it should be one step easier than using my hands to grab it. So why did it feel like I was about to jump into a blender full of broken glass?
Damn, but I wished I knew what I was doing. I wished that my mother had lived to teach me. I could visit her for a few minutes at a time in the spirit world, but that didn’t make for a good classroom. Plus if my dad—Vernon—wasn’t lying about Mom being a grifter, and that was a big if, then I couldn’t really trust my mom either.
I determinedly pushed away that worry. None of that mattered at the moment.
I sank into myself, searching for my link to my own trace. How had I never tried this before? Maybe because it felt a little touchy-feely stupid. Like one of those new-agey programs of self discovery. I snorted. Okay, maybe they weren’t so stupid. If I’d actually ever tried one, I might have learned something useful. I had given meditation a shot once or twice. This felt a little bit like that. ’Course I’d never been any good at it. Firefly thoughts kept buzzing into my head and distracting me. Like the fact that my boobs were killing me. Or that I was getting a crick in my neck. Or that I really wanted a jug of sweet, creamy coffee. I fought them off and concentrated on the power rushing into me. And out.
That last fact was crucial. The point where it left me was the intersection of me and my trace. Good thinking, I told myself by way of encouragement. Now find it and get inside. You’ve totally got this. Easy as pie.
Pie, by the way, is a lot harder than it sounds. Unless you’re eating it. That’s easy enough.
God. More firefly thoughts.
I followed the flow of magic down inside me. I couldn’t exactly see it. I felt like I ought to have been able to, but it was blurry and out of focus. The pull was inexorable, once I let myself fall into it. It whirled me around and carried me along, inward and through the middle of myself. The sensation made me nauseous and champagne fizzy at the same time. I turned inside out, and my skin and flesh held me together. My bones electrified, and I felt incandescent. Then I hit the intersection where my trace grew out of my essence.
My entire being jolted with something so primal, so deeply essential and basic, that I felt it on a plane of existence that I could only think of as my soul. I think I might have screamed. I don’t know. It wasn’t pain. It might have been pleasure. The intensity was so fierce that I felt every molecule of my body freeze. A small nova went off inside, spreading a shockwave of heat and ice and joy so thin and fine it was almost agony.
I stayed suspended there in that moment, in that space where I pierced through the root of myself, for I don’t know how long. Time didn’t matter. Only the feelings that radiated out and came crashing back, the ripples warring and growing more powerful with each expansion and contraction. I could have stayed there forever. I was drugged. High as a kite, as the stars themselves. I was a star. A sun. The whole damned universe.
I forgot everything. Nothing else mattered. This was divine. Touching God. Touching the very spark of creation. It couldn’t be anything else.
Cold. It seeped into me, turning sharp and knife-edged. It sliced down into me, down into that space where I hung enraptured. It didn’t hurt. I gathered in the feeling, letting it temper and increase the glorious feelings that had come before.
That’s about the time my brain kicked in. The part that wasn’t orgasming from my little trace masturbation. Cold meant I’d tapped into the spirit dimension. I’d opened a door. Or at least a window. Maybe a tiny hole. It didn’t matter. I’d done the hard part. Now all I had to do was go through to the other side.
Turned out that going through was nothing. Dragging myself away from the rapture of communing with my own trace was another something else altogether. Most of myself dug in, wanting to remain in that amazing place of between, where I felt light and bright and free and so incredibly euphoric. Blissful. Joyful. There were no words to truly describe my ecstasy.
The determined little wart that was my brain reminded happy Riley that Price needed help. That my family needed help. That the world as I knew it was coming to an end.
Happy Riley didn’t seem to give a damn, though. All that drama was too far away and so very small in the grand scheme of the universe. Warty brain smacked happy Riley alongside the head and grabbed her by the hair, then proceeded to drag her down from Orgasm Mountain and dump her into the frigid ice of the spirit dimension.
Arctic cold slapped my face. I reeled as I collected myself. Glorious sensation continued to reverberate through me, but my mind was clear. I looked around.
The velvety purple black of the spirit dimension surrounded me. A jungle of jewel-tone
d trace ribbons flowed across it, tangling and trailing in every direction as far as the eye could see. Silky tatters of opalescent energy floated through like ghosts. They probably were.
Holy crap. I’d actually made it.
Cold continued to press in on me, but unlike my last two trips through, it didn’t instantly sink its thorns deep into the marrow of my bones. I felt somewhat insulated, though the cold would chew through soon enough. I glanced down at myself. I looked like a watercolor painting. Not transparent, not like my mom when she’d appeared to me here, but still wavery and not quite real. I was wrapped in green light the color of oak leaves. Curls of silver swirled through it like smoke. I blinked. I seemed to be inside my trace. It was protecting me from the deadly chill of the spirit world. Not forever though. I knew I couldn’t stay here too long, all the same. Not that I planned to. I was going to get out right now.
I’d already decided where I was going. Given that I didn’t know how far-reaching Price’s destruction was, I had chosen to return to the mouth of the cave and make my way back to the compound and hope there was something left. I didn’t let myself think that Price had killed my family. I had to believe he’d protected them the way he’d protected me. If not—
I shoved that thought away and turned my attention back to the task at hand. Ordinarily, I would take hold of my trace in my hand and follow it back to wherever I’d been that I wanted to return to. I supposed now I needed to just push myself along the inside of my trace until I found the right spot. I pictured one of those message systems where you put your message in a tube and sent it rocketing along to its destination.
I started to push off.
“Riley?”
I stopped, twisting around. My mother stood—floated really—right behind me. Her skin glowed with mother-of-pearl color. I could see right through her. She looked the same age as she been when she died—just about the same age I was now. We looked a lot alike, except her hair was more auburn than copper. Taylor looked more like her than I did. There was some irony for you.
“What are you doing here? Are you inside your trace?” Her eyes widened.
“I was trapped. This was the only way out.”
Her gaze sharpened. “Trapped?”
“My boyfriend cascaded and then lost it. I ended up in some sort of protective magic cocoon. This is my way out, but I need to get back and help him.”
She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. You need to stay away until he drains or stops on his own.”
“I can’t. I wasn’t alone. Leo, Jamie, Taylor, and Mel were with me. Plus some friends and a whole building full of people.”
“Christ.” She came closer and peered at me through the veil of my trace. “They are alive at least.”
I hadn’t realized how scared I was that Price had killed them. So scared I’d forgotten to look and see for myself. I shuddered with reaction. “Thank goodness.”
“Thank your boyfriend,” Mom said. “That he’s managed that kind of control during a cascade eruption means that maybe you can help him. You’d better go. Don’t try to travel through the trace to him. It could be very dangerous.”
“How?”
Her head tilted in a way that seemed really familiar. Then I realized. The gesture reminded me of me. “Dangerously dangerous,” she said with a little grin.
Now I knew where I got my sense of humor. “That’s helpful,” I said, rolling my eyes. I wonder if I got that from her, too.
“Do you really have time for a magic lesson? I’m telling you it would be a bad idea. Deadly even. Don’t do it. Get back to the physical plane. Now, get going.”
I nodded acknowledgment and yet didn’t move. “Dad—Vernon—said you were a grifter.” I blurted the words, then bit my lips as I waited for her response.
Her head tipped to the side. “I suppose I was, as much as anything,” came her unexpected answer.
“What does that mean?”
“I have a lot to tell you. You were supposed to come see me.”
“I haven’t had time. And I had to heal up from—” I broke off. How did I explain that I’d had to have my thumb reattached after a sociopath cut it off, and then I’d been kidnapped by my father’s henchman? To get away, I’d nearly killed myself. That was last week. This week was looking busier. “Anyhow, I’d planned to come back and see you, but then Dad showed up and all this happened with Price. My boyfriend,” I added, realizing she didn’t know who he was. “Plus I nearly got kidnapped again by Savannah Morrell. Oh, and this FBI agent I hate has asked for help finding some of her people. I said I’d help her.”
Some people have simple to-do lists. Fix dinner, pick the kids up, go to work, clean the bathroom, grocery shop, blah blah blah. Mine read more like a comic-book hero’s. Or villain’s.
I could see my mom trying to sort out that deluge of bizarre information. Finally, she waved her hand dismissively.
“I have things to tell you. Before it’s too late.”
“Like about being a grifter.” I don’t know why that bothered me so much. It’s not like she’d been hiding it from me. She’d been dead. I’d only discovered her here in the spirit world a week ago, and we’d not exactly had a big heart-to-heart conversation.
I was starting to shiver as the cold worked its way through the insulating walls of my trace to find me. I clamped my teeth together as they started to chatter.
She gave a half smile that was both ironic and shrewd. “I was what I was. It kept a roof over my head and food on the table. I couldn’t let anyone know who or what I really was. Same as you. I make no apologies, and regrets are useless. Anyway, I gave up grifting when I married your father. I never hid my past from him.”
Same as you. I knew so little about her, and what I did know had come from Vernon, whether he told me things or injected fake memories into my brain. But this much was true. She knew what it was like to have to hide, to fear that someone would discover her and either enslave her or kill her. In that, we were exactly alike.
I frowned as I realized that there was something in the way she changed the emphasis in that last sentence. I itched to be on my way, but—
“You did hide things from Dad, though.”
Her smile faded. “I did. But now it appears those secrets are unraveling, and you are the one to pay the price.”
I wrapped my arms around myself as cold wrapped my spine and wriggled through my veins. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “Not now. You have been here long enough, even protected as you are. Just don’t wait too long to return. With your father back . . .” She looked grim. “I don’t like this.”
“Why?”
“I would not trust him,” she said, the words coming slowly, almost unwillingly.
“Why not?”
She cocked her head at me, then gave a little nod, as if convincing herself. “You are the last of the Kensington line. Zachary Kensington was your many times great-grandfather. I believe your father is aware of this. I believe he knew I was of that blood when we met. I believe our meeting was no accident.” She finished with a tightening of her lips. A bitter smile. “Go now. Come see me again. Soon.”
With that she simply vanished. I stared at where she’d been. I didn’t know what to think or how to react. Why would the fact I was related to Kensington matter to anyone?
Before I jetted off into Distraction Land, I caught myself. My mom’s news didn’t change what was happening with Price and the danger to everyone I loved. It was just another mystery to deal with later, providing I lived long enough.
I turned my attention to getting where I needed to go. I pushed off, sliding through my trace again. I arrived so fast that I almost shot past the spot. I reversed the process of getting into my trace, ignoring the solar burst of bliss. Well, I tried to ignore it. I slowed, tak
ing more time than I should have to pull myself through and out.
I exited my trace more easily than I expected. All of a sudden, I was back in the frigid air of the Colorado winter night. Actually, I sprawled facedown on a pile of rocks and snow. I lay there a moment, letting myself adjust to the pain. It probably ought to have worried me that I didn’t feel cold at all. I was too numb from the spirit dimension. Finally, I groaned and worked on standing up. It took a few tries. My knees hurt something fierce, and a rock wedged into my ribs like an iceberg under the Titanic.
When I managed to get to my feet, I swayed. My head spun, and a warm trickle of blood ran down my cheek. I touched my face and sucked in a quick breath. The cut was a good two or three inches long and extended from the middle of my right cheek into my hair. I scooped up a handful of snow and pressed it against the wound. Hopefully the cold would stop the bleeding.
I ached like I’d been used as a punching bag. When this was over, I wanted to spend a week in my bathtub. I snorted. When this was over. As if that would happen anytime soon.
I glanced around. I had arrived in the stand of trees and boulders just beyond the cave entrance, exactly where I’d been aiming. Somehow I’d remembered there being fewer rocks.
That’s when I became aware of the sound of wind. The clearing I stood in was still as death. Not a breath of air stirred. And yet—I could hear the roar of the wind, like a tornado.
Price.
I dropped my handful of bloody snow and started running.
Chapter 15
BECAUSE I’M JUST that sort of brilliant, I’d figured out that Price’s talent had to do with air or wind. Also, water is wet.
I was unprepared for the strength of his talent, even knowing that when he was three years old he’d wreaked Armageddon across a mountain. People do exaggerate.
Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels) Page 19