Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels)

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  Dalton and Taylor brushed both of them aside when they tried to pick up the stretcher.

  “You couldn’t carry a tune at this point,” Taylor told Leo when he tried to protest. “You’ve done your part. We’ll do ours.”

  She and Dalton took the stretcher through first, then Jamie and Leo followed. I had a staring contest with Arnow, and she won, so I went next, and she brought up the rear. Maybe she figured if she didn’t follow me, I might not work up the courage to go through. She was probably right.

  I heard Price’s mother saying something as we left, but couldn’t make out the words. Everything sounded muffled. A blanket of numbness had dropped over me. I’d withdrawn into an emotional space where I didn’t have to feel. It was totally artificial. I knew it. But I clung to the relief all the same. I needed to be strong. I could break down later.

  Luckily, that made going through the death tube much easier. Even though I could sense terror bubbling angrily through me, I didn’t actually experience it.

  I reached the other side and immediately looked for Price. He slumped over on his side. Leo and Jamie had already started toward him. I wanted to call them off, but they only hoisted him into a sitting position. His head lolled and tipped back. Streaks of drying blood ran from his nose. More drenched the torn legs of his coveralls. It looked like he’d lost a gallon.

  Numbness shattered. I made a sound like a wounded cat.

  “Here.” Dalton tossed a heal-all pendant to Leo, who snatched it out of the air and dropped it around Price’s neck. In the meantime, Jamie tore a strip from his shirt and tied it around Price’s leg.

  By the time I got to his side, Price’s eyes had flickered open. They were back to his normal sapphire. His gaze moved slowly over everyone until he found me, and then he smiled weakly.

  My brothers pulled Price to his feet. He sagged between them, but they drew his arms over their shoulders and slid supporting arms around his neck. Price’s head hung down.

  “Let’s get out of here before we can’t,” Arnow said, spurring everyone to get moving. She stood in the doorway, waiting.

  As they passed out of the room, Jamie and Leo paused and half-turned. Without exchanging a word, they released the metal webbing that held the rock tunnel open. It collapsed with a grinding roar and a puff of dust, sealing Price’s mother on the other side.

  It wasn’t a death sentence. Someone would find her before she died of thirst or from the cold. But they weren’t going to make the rescue easier for her. I couldn’t help the angry triumph I took from that.

  Arnow fell into stride beside me, her wrapped feet making a shushing sound on the floor. She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her darting looks at me.

  “Spit it out,” I said as we reached the stairwell leading up. Dalton and Taylor had already maneuvered the stretcher onto the back zig of the stairs. Price had begun to move on his own. Leo and Jamie continued to brace him, guiding his zombie steps up. His feet had stopped bleeding, at least, thanks to the healing pendant.

  “You know that this is only the beginning, right? You’ll all be fugitives now. Criminals. Every LEO will be after you, and they’ll want you only marginally less than the scumbag Tyet honchos out there. They’ll all be coming for you.”

  “Not exactly news,” I said, even though her saying it out loud made it real in a way it hadn’t seemed before. “What’s your point?”

  “Have you got somewhere safe to go to ground?”

  “Yep.” My house in Karnickey Burrows would keep us under the radar, at least for now. Though it would be crowded for all of us, and I wasn’t letting Dalton or Arnow in or telling them where it was. Later we’d have to figure something else out. But that could wait until Price and I rescued his brother.

  “Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.

  “You don’t have to worry. I don’t plan to get killed or captured.” I trudged up the stairs, exhaustion leeching all my strength.

  “The best laid plans . . .” she pointed out.

  I sighed. “We’ll be fine. Then we’ll get Touray. Then I’ll help you.” I glanced at her. I asked the next question reluctantly. I didn’t really want to know. “Do you think they’ll be okay for a little while yet?”

  She shrugged, but tension pulled tight around her eyes, belying her casual tone. “Maybe. Probably. I hope so. Anyway, believe it or not, I wasn’t thinking about them. I was thinking about you.”

  Sure she wasn’t. I totally believed that. ’Cause I was born yesterday and fell off a turnip truck right after. I didn’t say it.

  We climbed some more. By the time we reached the fifth level, Price was walking mostly on his own. He’d not spoken since he’d seen the stretcher with Mel’s body. He kept his head down, his shoulders hunched. I knew he was bleeding from the guilt over Mel. No magic pendant would cure that. Leo and Jamie continued to frame him, lending him support when he stumbled.

  “You’ve quite a family,” Arnow said, so softly I almost didn’t hear her.

  The corners of my mouth turned in a smile. “They are amazing. More than I deserve. I—” A ball of emotion filled my chest, and I broke off.

  “They use that against you. Your enemies do. Family. Friends. It’s one thing to get yourself into trouble, another to drag the people you love in,” Arnow said in a bleak voice. “It can break you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t let it.”

  I glanced at her and then at Mel’s stretcher.

  “Is that even possible?”

  She shrugged. “I’d like to think so. I hope so. For your sake, anyhow.”

  “Because you need me to find your friends.”

  “Because you don’t deserve it.”

  I snorted. “What the hell do you know?”

  “I know I’d be honored to be your friend.”

  That had me gaping.

  She chuckled, dry and mocking. “Don’t worry, I don’t expect it.”

  “That’s good,” I said, more out of reflex than anything else. My brain was still reeling from her declaration. Friends? Me and her? I guess stranger things had happened, but I couldn’t begin to imagine one just at the moment. Maybe me thinking of Touray as family. That was pretty bizarre, but no, this was even more so. And weirdly, I was tempted to believe her. She’d sounded like she really meant it. I shook my head. I didn’t remember hitting it, but I had to have a head injury to even consider believing Arnow wanted to be friends.

  The others had reached the top of the hole where Price and I had entered. They gazed around. The dust still hung in a low cloud, but higher up it had begun to settle. The ghostly shape of the building’s remains stood like a skeleton above us. Arnow and I picked our way through the rubble on the stairs and joined them. I looked at Price, who still stood between Leo and Jamie. He stared at the wreckage. His arms dangled loose at his sides. I put my hand in his. No matter what happened, he wasn’t alone. His fingers tightened hard on mine.

  “He’s not going to get far without shoes,” Leo said, motioning toward Price’s feet. “Plus the cold will take his toes.” He glanced at Arnow. “She’s not much better off.”

  “I’ll manage. I’m not going to hold you up,” Price growled.

  Leo ignored him. He bent and unlaced his boots, pulling off both socks and jamming his bare feet back inside. He held the socks out. “Put these on.”

  Price looked like he wanted to protest, but he said nothing, let go of me, and took them. Jamie did the same thing for Arnow. She pulled them on over her wrappings.

  A whirring slithery sound broke the heavy silence of the destruction and made me jump. A few seconds later, electrical wires, pulled from the carnage, snaked over the ground. The copper slid out of the colored plastic insulation and wound around and under Price’s wool-clad feet.

  “Lift you
r left foot.”

  Price complied.

  “Now your right.”

  The wires coiled and wove together to create a kind of sandal, with a thickly matted sole he could walk on. The project was repeated with Arnow.

  “That should do it,” Leo said.

  “Let’s go, then,” Dalton said.

  For once I was in a hurry to get inside a cave. I felt exposed, like we were being watched. Like even now, guns held us in their crosshairs. I’d rather be under a billion tons of rock than out in the open.

  Once again Leo and Jamie fell in beside Price. I frowned; it was beginning to look like they were guarding him. Arnow and I brought up the rear. Just inside the tree line, or what I supposed was the tree line, were the shattered remains of the building. Its carcass mounded in a wall and circled around into the darkness following the edge of the now-vanished barrier Price had created. Most of what was left was no bigger than my fist, like the entire building had gone through a blender. Price’s superhero name: Vitamix Man. Need a building knocked down? He’s your guy.

  Leo and Jamie made another tunnel in the rubble and led the way through. As I waited for my turn, I dropped into trace sight and turned to look behind us.

  “Oh shit,” I whispered.

  In the city, which is my normal habitat, I am surrounded by trace. It is everywhere, like mounds of tangled yarn blocked only by buildings, and even then they are covered with the tracks of those who built them. In the wild, there’s always trace, but it’s usually a loose weaving of colored ribbon. For me, it’s a little like looking at an aurora borealis. The black goes on forever, and the colored weavings extend as far as I can see. The city becomes a brilliant explosion of light.

  Only this time, what I saw was a line of massed traces circling around the compound and inching down toward it. But that wasn’t what scared me. Just behind that leading edge of colorful trace was another line, this one of gray death, like those who were now descending on the compound, had slaughtered everything in their path and then moved on.

  “What is it?”

  Arnow put a hand on my arm and gave me a little shake. I realized she’d been asking, and I’d not heard.

  “Company.” I turned toward the tunnel, and looked up. More descended over the ridge above us. We were surrounded. Had they found the helicopter? The cave passage? I didn’t even know who they were. And who were the first they that had been slaughtered up along the ridgeline?

  I scrambled through the tunnel, my heart revving into high gear again. My exhaustion sloughed away beneath the tide of adrenaline. I slid out the other side and lost my footing, landing on my hip and side. I barely felt the pain in my agitation. Arnow helped me up. Leo and Jamie let the tunnel collapse behind me.

  “We’re surrounded,” I said as everyone looked at me. “Coming over the ridges of the valley. What’s weird is that there’s a lot of dead trace, like there was a first group and the second overtook them and killed them.” I shook my head. “A lot of dead trace. A small army. And a bigger one coming now.”

  Silence and an exchange of baffled looks met my announcement.

  “FBI maybe?” Taylor was the first to speak.

  “Which one?” I asked. “First group or second?” I had a feeling it had been the first. The second was bloodthirsty and didn’t care about whoever got in their way. Feds tended to care a little more. Which meant we were screwed if the second group got a hold of us.

  “Does it matter?” Dalton said. “We’ve got to move. Now.”

  I’d wondered if the second line might be my father’s people. Now I knew they weren’t. Dalton wouldn’t run from them. A chill ran down my spine. Even though I didn’t trust Vernon, he was a known evil. This other—could it be the people Oriana Price had promised were coming? I voiced the question out loud.

  Price’s head jerked around to look at me. His face was carved in austere lines, and his eyes were sunken and hollow. I couldn’t read his expression, but then, I didn’t need to. I knew he was swimming in guilt and recriminations. I knew he felt like an anchor dragging us all under.

  “If so, what do they want?” Arnow asked.

  The obvious answer was us, especially Price. Before I could blurt that out, she continued.

  “Mommy Dearest said her people wanted you dead,” she said to Price. “But if so, then why didn’t they just napalm the place? Hit it with bombs? Coming in like this, in force, says these people want you alive. So maybe she lied, or maybe it’s somebody else. Maybe whoever it is is after something else altogether. But if they are here for you, then they’ve got to be fairly confident they’ll be able to take you down. Likely they’ve got a mountain of nulls or binders and a lot of firepower.”

  “All the more reason to get the fuck out. Move it!” Dalton ordered.

  We all jumped to obey. Dalton and Taylor led the way with Mel’s stretcher. Leo and Jamie went next.

  “Are you coming?” Arnow asked as I bent to pick up a rock.

  “In a minute,” I said, considering it. If our pursuers had a tracer—which they would, and probably a good one—we needed to null out or we’d be followed and captured in nothing flat. But the trace was already laid down. Nulling it now wouldn’t help. I needed to reel it up. Which wasn’t possible. Unless I could find a way. Given how many impossible things I’d done already tonight, this had to be a piece of cake.

  I moved down and sat under a tree, my back to it. Arnow watched me impatiently.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Trying to keep them from following us,” I said absently. “You should shut up now. Go tell the others to keep going. I’ll follow when I can.”

  She said something crude and also anatomically impossible, and then stormed off. I focused on the power inside me and drew it up. God, but it hurt. I’d overused my power to the point that the slightest working hurt. This was going to be a lot more substantial than that.

  I took a breath and let it out, closing my eyes as I sorted out how to get rid of the trace we’d already laid down. Since learning to travel through the spirit dimension, I’d discovered that nulling didn’t do away with trace, it just hid it. So maybe what I wanted to do was hide the trace we’d already laid down, not actually destroy it.

  I reached into the icy spirit space and gathered up all our trace, including what we’d laid down when arriving. I twisted all the strands around the rock as an anchor and also as a conduit for my power. Then I started building the null.

  I let myself sink entirely into the process. I dug for power. It moved like sludge inside of me. I reached deeper, searching for the source of my magic and dragging it out of myself. I didn’t know how much it would take, but I had to make it enough. I sucked whatever energy I could out of the protective nulls on my belly and head. I hadn’t had a chance to recharge them, but a little was better than nothing.

  As I sank deeper into my work, the world spun away. The rock in my hands was the only island of solidity. I couldn’t feel the snow under my butt or the tree against my back. My eyes weighed too much to open, even if I wanted to.

  Deeper and deeper. I drove down relentlessly, searching for every little scrap of power I could muster. The null glowed in my mind’s eye. Was it enough? I didn’t think so. It didn’t feel any different from one of my normal nulls. It needed more. And I needed to tie the power to our trace. I started weaving them together. That’s when I realized how it could work. Elation bubbled through me.

  Bubble may be too strong a word. It oozed as best it could, like tar through beaches of salt and sand.

  I set about creating spirals along each of the trace ribbons. I soldered them into the null and spelled each one to spring out as soon as the null was activated. They’d fling outward as far as the magic had strength to send them. Where the coils slid over someone’s trace, it would disappear.

/>   After I finished the spells for the direction we were going, I turned it back to where we’d come from. Sooner or later, our pursuers would find our trail, but if they didn’t know we’d crossed the wall, or which direction we’d gone when we came up out of the underground, it would take longer. We needed that time to get away. I needed to make this work.

  Only I’d reached my limits. Hell, I’d gone way past them, and if I didn’t tie off the null soon, it would explode in my hands. I’d be dead, and the whole attempt would be useless. The trouble was, I could tell that it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop yet. I had to find more power.

  I don’t know when I realized that magic was building around me. I could feel it in the air against my skin. I snatched at it, pulling it in. It had a flavor. Like Leo, sweet, biting, metallic. More flowed round me. Jamie. A different metallic, and sour with heat. And more. This time I didn’t recognize it. It burned me almost, but with a cold so deep it hurt. The taste was like summer berries and winter wine. It had to be Dalton. Price was out of gas, and neither Taylor nor Arnow had any magic to offer me.

  I grabbed what was given and poured it into the null. Its magic swelled. When it reached the level where I thought it would do the trick, I tied it off before letting go of the others’ magic.

  While passing out at that point seemed like a good choice, I wasn’t allowed. I found myself on the ground, with angry people all around me arguing in loud whispers. My hands wrapped the rock in iron claws.

  “Shut it!” someone said louder than the others. Arnow. Her voice chopped through the other voices like an ax. “Bitch at her later, but right now, see if that null she made can be activated and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Someone lifted me up into a sitting position.

  “Riley? Can you stand up?” That was Taylor.

  I made a sound like gargling marbles.

  “Someone will have to carry her. Should you make another stretcher?” That was Arnow. Funny how she was in the thick of things. Couldn’t trust her at all, and yet she was still helping. She had said she wanted to be friends. Plus she needed my help. And she wasn’t too eager to get caught here, either.