Dreamwalker

by Allyson James

  Emmett dragged in a deep breath. He closed his eyes, balled his fists, then opened his mouth and expelled an inky black mist. The mist hit his wavering Beneath shield and vanished.

  Drake hadn’t waited for him to finish. He shot fire into Emmett as soon as the black mist had dispersed, and Emmett again flinched.

  Then he opened his eyes, rage flaring, and slammed Drake with Beneath magic coupled with a spell.

  Drake countered with a wall of fire, but he was thrown upward, slammed into the magic mirror, hit the top of the bar, and toppled forward to the floor. He staggered up, then roared as Emmett’s spell sliced into him. Drake’s hands went to his face, the dragon tatts that clasped his throat and neck fading.

  “One down,” Emmett said. He pointed at Cassandra, and she rose into the air, Pamela reaching for her in alarm. Cassandra clutched her chest, gasped out a string of odd-sounding words, and fell again, breathing hard. Pamela caught her and gently eased her back into the chair, then turned a snarl on Emmett.

  “Maybe two,” Emmett continued. He easily tossed aside the magics Mick and I hit him with as he’d focused on Cassandra. “Is this the best you can do, Janet?”

  The door to the kitchen swung open to reveal Elena framed in its doorway. She raised her hands and began to chant.

  The language was ancient Apache, I assumed, at least, far older than what the White Mountain Apaches spoke today. Elena’s voice was clear, beautiful, compelling, and the hotel shook as the pool of shaman power in the basement rose to engulf her.

  Emmett was definitely distracted by that. I gathered the entirety of the storm outside, married it to my very angry Beneath magic, joined it with Mick’s fire, and let him have it.

  Wind whipped through the saloon, tearing a bigger hole in the roof. Rain poured down, drenching us. The rain could do nothing, though, to quench the fire that seared across Emmett’s body or stop bolts of lightning I slammed into him.

  Emmett screamed. I’d felt firsthand in my dream what it was like to be burned by dragon fire. Now Emmett’s body melted with it, his spell to counter it thwarted by the full power of my dual magic and Mick’s fire.

  Triple threat.

  The air around Emmett turned black. Pressure filled my ears, and the building rumbled ominously. I took a hesitant step back, just before the blackness shattered into fragments of obsidian.

  I ducked as the deadly pieces sailed by. When I came up, I saw Emmett standing calmly in the middle of my falling-down saloon, brushing off his sleeves.

  “Janet,” he said in a quiet voice. “Now you’re starting to piss me off.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Elena!” I yelled. “If you’re here to help—do it!”

  Elena ignored me. She continued to chant, her arms raised, unprotected in the doorway.

  “Not yet,” my grandmother said behind her. “It doesn’t work that way. The young are always so impatient.”

  Emmett sliced a shaft of magic past them both and blew up the kitchen.

  Before the resulting flames could hit my grandmother and Elena, two slim arms came around them, and Ansel leapt upward as only a Nightwalker can. He took them out through the roof, but I didn’t have time to see whether Grandmother and Elena made it to safety, because Emmett was on me again.

  “You’re dangerous, Janet,” he said over the roar of fire, wind, lightning, and rain. “All that magic swirling around inside you, and you have no idea what to do with it.”

  I couldn’t answer, concentrating on wrestling aside the Beneath magic he threw at me.

  “Remember my analogy?” he asked. “When I told you how frustrated you’d be if you saw someone with an amazing camera, who didn’t know what to do with it? How you’d watch them blunder about, ruining it? That’s how I feel when I look at you. All that brilliant power roiling around inside you. Relinquish it to me, and I might let you and your friends live. They’d no longer be a threat to me, anyway.”

  “Screw you!” I think I yelled. My hands were slick with sweat, my body cold. I fought, but I could feel myself losing.

  He’d do it. Emmett would take my magic as he’d taken Gabrielle’s, leaving me an empty shell. Once he had that, Emmett would wrest away the mirror, and have everything he needed. I didn’t think even Coyote or the Beneath goddess would be able to stop him then.

  Emmett chuckled. His eyes became the opaque, steel-colored orbs I’d seen in my dreams. “I am so looking forward to this,” he said.

  He brought his palms together, then jerked his arms straight down. Without changing his stance, he turned and swatted aside the fire Mick shot at him, sending it back to burn him.

  Mick wasn’t there when the fire returned. Moving as fast as a Nightwalker, he dove out a hole in the wall—not running away, I knew, but giving himself space to turn dragon. If nothing else, he could snatch up Emmett and drop him somewhere far away again, maybe into a volcano if we were lucky.

  Emmett jerked his hands apart, and his magic began to tear me in two.

  I shrieked. The pain that Mick, Drake, and Gabrielle must have felt cut into me and tore me apart, molecule by molecule. Agony stabbed through me as everything that made up my being was studied, dissected, and pulled asunder.

  I became sharply aware of my two distinct parts—the Stormwalker with the shaman powers of my grandmother, Ruby; and the child of the Beneath-magic goddess. The magic from Beneath was immensely strong, could do anything, kill anyone. The Stormwalker was of this earth, drawing magic from the ground that had created her.

  Drake was on his knees on the floor, rocking back and forth, his dragon-ness gone. Emmett had stolen it, just as he’d done to Mick in the dream. He’d done a similar thing to Gabrielle. Emmett was now trying to separate me from my magic, or rather, my magic from me.

  Two parts of a whole—Stormwalker and Beneath goddess. I’d been fighting the two natures all my life. Now Emmett, with a flick of his wrist, yanked them apart.

  The pain went on and on, so terrible that I became curiously detached from it. I saw my body coalesce into two distinct ones, two Janets, each slightly translucent and hanging a few inches above the debris-strewn floor.

  One Janet had skin darkened by genetics and a life in the sunshine. The other’s skin glowed white, the unhealthy shade of a goddess who never saw the sun of this earth.

  The two of us were powerful, but I realized immediately that I derived my strongest magic from the mixture. I’d never understood how much until this moment.

  It was the grounding of the Stormwalker that let me draw the Beneath magic and focus it. Likewise, my well of Beneath magic let me enhance the storms and direct them where I wanted them to go. I’d been working in the past year to find the exact balance that would make me strong and keep me sane at the same time. I had nearly learned that equilibrium, until Emmett, this moment, stole it from me.

  I hung there, staring at myself, seeing out of both Janets at the same time. Stormwalker watched Beneath goddess, and Beneath goddess watched Stormwalker.

  Mick chose that moment to tear off the rest of the roof. His black dragon head peered down, fire in his eyes. He saw the two mes dangling in the air, and stopped.

  “No,” I told him, both Janets speaking in tandem. “If you kill him now, I’ll never live.”

  Mick must have understood that, or Emmett would already have been snatched up. Mick drew his head back, his eyes filled with rage and frustration.

  “Get Drake, Cass, and Pamela to safety,” I told him, my voice chorusing.

  Mick reached down and plucked up Drake. Cassandra raised her hands. “No, I’m not letting this bastard win.”

  She’d die trying, I saw. I didn’t want to lose Cassandra, but Mick backed off. He would understand that she needed to fight. Pamela looked unhappy, but she would stay with Cassandra and protect her while I couldn’t.

  Mick withdrew, but I knew he wouldn’t go far. I held on to the comfort of knowing he was near. The turquoise and onyx ring he’d given me clasped the finger
s of both Janets, the sensation letting me know he’d never desert me.

  I looked at the ring now on my left hand … Then realized, as I faced myself, that the ring on Beneath-magic Janet was on the right hand, as though I looked at my own reflection.

  Reflections …

  Emmett’s magic could split people into their essential parts, each an image of the other—if not exact in the case of the dragons. He wanted a magic mirror to enhance his abilities, doubling his power, or perhaps multiplying it infinite times. A mirror reflecting a mirror showed a never-ending corridor of possibilities.

  Mirrors also showed what was truly there. My mirror had shoved me into the dreamwalking to explain to me what was truth, and what I had to face.

  Emmett had broken the mirror when he’d come out of it. Because it had revealed his true self? The skin sunken into the skull, the eyes points of light?

  Emmett had become that being by siphoning off power from mage after mage, stealing magic until he’d exhausted his mortal body. He had to keep up a glam in order to interact with the world. No client would have wanted to come to his sleek office building to entrust their money to him if they’d seen his real guise.

  He’d made sure the glam was in place when he emerged from the mirror, because even he didn’t want to face the mirror and see the truth.

  Reflections, I mused, even as the dark part of my brain screamed in pain. Reflections of reality—in a magic mirror.

  And suddenly, I knew how to use the mirror against him.

  The knowledge came to me on a whisper—no idea if it was a product of my own mind, the mirror, Mick, my grandmother, Elena, Cassandra—someone else trying to help me. It didn’t matter. I knew what I needed to do.

  Both of me turned and extended the hand that wore the ring. “Smooth,” we said together.

  Lightning crackled around the hand of the Stormwalker. A ball of Beneath magic balanced in the hand of the goddess. Together we threw the magic—lightning and white fire—into the mirror.

  The mirror let out a sound of nails on glass—Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

  The pieces of glass flowed into one another, glowing as red as the mirror had under Flora’s spell. The two Janets moved their hands, and the glass slid to the edges of the frame, polished and whole. The mirror’s scream died suddenly away into thoughtful silence.

  Emmett snarled and threw a black spell our way. Beneath magic Janet laughed and danced aside. The Stormwalker broke the spell with a bolt of lightning.

  “Mick!” I shouted, the two voices of me rising together. “Hold him!”

  A dragon talon obligingly came down, closed around Emmett, and shoved him where I pointed—against the mirror.

  He fought. Emmett drove spell after spell into Mick with the speed of a machine gun. Mick flinched and shrieked, his claw and leathery skin heating to molten red then icy white, the talon cracking and bleeding.

  But Mick was made of tough stuff. He could ignore pain to focus on what he wanted with dragon intensity. Right now, he wanted Emmett against the mirror.

  Cassandra was on her feet, chanting words, her fingers moving. I heard her say “Bind,” then black threads fell over Emmett like a steel net. He struggled, but the threads were strong. They bound Mick’s claw as well, but again, Mick wouldn’t care as long as he finished what he set out to do.

  The net kept Emmett from breaking free of Mick, but it didn’t stop his magic. He threw a spell at Cassandra, his hand shaped into a claw, and then started to suck off her magic.

  Cassandra determinedly chanted again, though her face lost color and she had to slump against Pamela. Even so, she went on with her spell as though resolved that she’d dose Emmett good before she went down.

  I didn’t worry about her, because I knew in the end, she’d be all right.

  The double me moved to Emmett, neither of us touching the ground. We stood to either side of him, hands with the rings reaching out to the mirror’s frame.

  “Reflect,” we said. “See what is inside you.”

  I’d never before seen Emmett terrified. Worried a few times, but never out and out scared shitless. I did now. His gray eyes widened, his pupils became pinpricks, and a few drops of blood slid from his nose.

  The sight of those scarlet drops bolstered my confidence. When I’d first met Emmett he’d said that when he’d initially begun using great magics, he’d get a nosebleed from the pressure of it, which he’d since learned to handle.

  He couldn’t handle it today. That meant my idea was working.

  Beneath-magic Janet grabbed the back of his neck and slammed him against the glass. The Stormwalker eased the shard of magic mirror she always kept with her from her pocket and held it behind Emmett, angling it so that the mirror repeated back on itself.

  “See,” we said.

  Emmett let out a keening sound. The mirror repeated the noise, the wail rising until I thought my eardrums would burst.

  The reflection of Emmett, gray-eyed, dark-suited executive shattered into two, then three, then tens, then hundreds. Those images began to change, disintegrating from Emmett into figures of people, so many people.

  His victims, I realized. Every single being he’d stolen from since he’d decided to become the greatest mage in all the world.

  I saw them, from simplest apprentice to adept mage like the one I’d watched him battle this summer. I saw Gabrielle, then Drake, and then Cassandra at the end of the line of victims, the last he’d siphoned from today.

  The mirror showed me all. They stood, some alive and broken, some obviously dead, their shades looking back at Emmett and making me shiver.

  “You reap what you sow, Emmett,” I said in my double voice. “And now today, you’ll pay.”

  Mick and Cassandra still bound Emmett, so the two Janets put our hands on the mirror and slid every bit of magic we had into it.

  “Return,” we said.

  “No!” Emmett’s nose began to stream blood, his terror coming at me through the glass.

  I held on, relentless. Magic began to pour out of Emmett as fast as the blood, diving into the mirror and then reflecting, not into the hundreds of mages as I’d supposed, but into me.

  The rush of it sent me off the ground toward the peeled-back, ruined tin ceiling. I grabbed the frame of the mirror and hung on.

  All the magics poured into me, beginning with what he’d managed to pull from Cassandra, Drake, and Gabrielle, to a water mage who’d gotten in his way a few days ago, to more and more mages down the years.

  He’d taken from all—witches, demons, shamans, Changers, Nightwalkers, skinwalkers—every single magical person he could best, Emmett had robbed. He was the Ununculous because he’d defeated the last mage who’d called himself that, and I drew the collected magics of that Ununculous into me as well.

  All these, plus the power of the magic mirror and the original powers of Emmett himself—fairly strong earth magic—now became part of me.

  I no longer had to hold on to the mirror to use its magics. My disparate bodies floated upward then slid together and became one.

  Emmett, crying, sank to the floor. Blood poured from his nose, and he weakly tried to mop it up with a wad of tissue he’d pulled from his pocket.

  He was no longer the slick executive Emmett, nor was he the scary walking-dead Emmett. He was an ordinary looking man with a body running to fat, hair thinning on top, and eyes of indeterminate hazel, blinking behind thick-lensed glasses. He was more ordinary looking even than Fremont Hansen, whose kindhearted and affable personality made him well-liked and unique.

  Emmett was a nobody. A man so nondescript no one noticed him, and he likely didn’t have the personality to compensate. And so he’d enhanced the magic inside him and learned to steal from others to remake himself and get back at the world.

  All that magic was now inside me. I had knowledge of ages and the cosmos, of magic and chemistry, folklore and true history. It filled me, that knowledge, artistry, and skill, and made me laugh.

 
“So much for Emmett Smith,” I announced, while Cassandra and Pamela watched me, open-mouthed. Mick had at some point shifted back from dragon, and now he stood in the doorway of the burned-out kitchen, my delectable man of fire.

  “So much for the Ununculous,” I said, carrying on my theme. I rose on a cushion of air. “He messed with the wrong mage, one with a magic mirror. Poor Emmett. Now I am the Ununculous.”

  I put out my hand, and changed the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  My reach extended all the way to Magellan, and I could see the little town in my mind’s eye. It was an ordinary community in this part of the Southwest, small but close-knit, people supplementing the goods they could find at local businesses with trips to Flag or Phoenix on the weekends. The Native Americans who lived here or came here to work were comfortably close to their families in the Indian nations that surrounded the area.

  I could do anything to these people, and I could do anything for these people.

  First, I gave everyone sleeping happy dreams. I gave a young woman in the vast Medina clan who’d been debating leaving home the knowledge that she could seek her fortune in the cities and still find a place with her family in Magellan. I assured one of the Salases that asking the woman of his dreams to marry him would result in a fine life together.

  I moved my knowledge into the home of Jamison Kee and Naomi Hansen, found Julie lying awake in her bedroom, and made her deafness go away. It was so easy, the manipulation of bones and nerves of the ear canal, so simple to make them work properly again. Why had no one else done this?

  The magic I worked on her wasn’t like the spell Jamison had performed this summer, to fade when the magic did, but a true cure. Julie’s physiology was now the way it was supposed to be.

  I withdrew as Julie sat up and gasped.

  I flowed away, to the outskirts of Magellan again, found Fremont and Flora staring at each other in front of Fremont’s house, and encouraged him to kiss her.

  I found Drake where Mick had stashed him on the other side of the railroad bed, and fed his dragon self back into him. I left him, gasping and astonished, and wended my way north to Flat Mesa.