Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  There was a pause. “But that wasn’t magic—” Vickie said uncertainly. “At least, not that I know. Harm wasn’t a magician.”

  “No. But magic might tell me something that science and psionics doesn’t. And Sovie might have seen something like this before. Marx knows the Russkies have more than their share of weird metas.” She described as well as she could Gairdner’s situation while Vickie listened. There was another pause.

  “All right, I’ll come with a kit and give it a shot. Be there in half an hour.”

  “Thanks.” Bella settled back on her chair, and resisted the urge to take one of Gairdner’s hands in hers.

  * * *

  Vickie brought two people with her, both CCCP. One was Soviette, but the other was the black-clad, porcelain-white-faced meta called Upyr. Althea Vladislava, was her given name, but even she rarely used it or answered to it.

  “Why—” Bella began, when Upyr waved a gloved hand at her to cut off the question.

  “Am beink to look for wolunteers for donations,” the young woman said. “Henergy donations, da? Ven donation is villink, is cleaner. Purer.”

  “Oh . . .” said Bella doubtfully. Then. “Oh!” with realization of what Upyr was talking about. Upyr’s power was like nothing Bella had ever seen before, but it could be exactly what they needed to at least hold the line. “Lemme text Ramona.” Well, that would solve one problem. Upyr was . . . well, her name meant “vampire” in Russian, but rather than blood, she both took and gave some form of—Bella wasn’t sure what to call it. Vital energy? Whatever it was, it was the same thing she and Einhorn had been pouring into Bull to no real effect.

  Ramona appeared in person in answer to Bella’s text, and went off with Upyr. After that, the girl came and went several times, arriving looking pink and nearly vibrating with vitality, leaving looking like her usual composed, white-faced self.

  Meanwhile Sovie and Vickie both huddled over Gairdner, while Bella did her best to restrain her impatience, perched on an examination-room stool. The two of them muttered in rapid Russian; Bella was conversant, but not fluent enough to follow much of it. “Da” and “Nyet” and “Nechevo,” she got, but they were getting deeply technical in rapid-fire medical Russian and she was not conversant in that. Vickie sketched signs in the air over Gairdner’s chest and studied them intently as they changed, then faded. Then she’d go to her laptop and tap a while, then go back to muttering to Jadwiga.

  Then, after this had gone on for almost an hour, they stopped Upyr and muttered at her. There was a lot of nodding and further muttering before Upyr went back out again in search of more victims. Finally Sovie gave a determined nod and the two of them turned their attention to Bella.

  “You are beink to haf good instincts, sestra,” the Russian doctor said warmly. “Comrade Victoria made postulate, Upyr and I confirm and agree. Harmony—created somethink like ve haf all three seen, but this”—she waved her hand at Bullwark’s prone body—“it goes beyond vat ve haf seen before.”

  Before Bella could blurt that she wanted them to get to the goddamn point, Vickie stepped in. “Harm was something like Thea—Upyr. Her overt power was to amplify energy, but now we know she could take it too. Yes, I know you know that. But this wasn’t a standard meta ability, obviously, and she hid it well. Until now, Upyr is the only one of her kind that Sovie’s ever seen . . . I’ve heard of something similar, but I’d never actually seen it until now. And she could do something Upyr can’t; just like you thought, she set up some sort of permanent drain on him, in the part of him that actually gives him his powers. It’s like she’s put a shunt in there. I don’t know where it’s going, Upyr can’t suss it out, and neither can Sovie. We only know it’s there, and though we’ve put a governor on it to slow the drain, neither of them can figure out how to shut it off.”

  At this point Bella was about ready to explode with frustration, but again, Vickie held up a gloved hand. “Whoa, wait. Just because they can’t, that doesn’t mean that I can’t. Remember the almost-disaster with the comm unit a few days ago?” Vickie waggled her eyebrows like a couple of semaphores, and briefly her fingers formed a shape like the Tesla device. “That was when I found out that magic works enough like psionics that I can probably cut the drain. For all intents and purposes, Harm was a vampire, and that’s one of the things my family specialized in for generations. I won’t lie to you, it’s magic, which means it’s risky. I can’t give you the odds on whether it will work or not right this minute, I can only tell you that if we don’t do this, he’s never going to come out of the coma, he’ll just keep draining down, and you can’t keep pouring energy down a hole. And you know this.”

  Yes, dammit, she knew this. Her fist hit the concrete wall beside her in frustration, but she did know this.

  “Is not just his best chance, sestra,” Jadwiga said solemnly. “Am tellink you as physician and healer, is his only chance.”

  “All right,” she said, after weighing the alternatives as best she could, and coming up with nothing better. “Let’s do this.”

  * * *

  Vickie was in a hurry, and lugging an extremely heavy bag—an old-fashioned portmanteau that had been in her family since the 1800s in fact—and wasn’t watching where she was going. As a consequence, she nearly ran into a chest. A male chest, covered only by a very nonstandard excuse for a T-shirt. Which meant that the chest could only belong to Red Djinni. . . .

  He caught her by the shoulders before she bounced off him. “Whoa, shorty. What’re you doing out of your cave? For that matter, what are you doing here in Medical lugging a suitcase?”

  She looked up and saw him sporting a different face today, one of his new favorites. If she hadn’t been in such a rush, she might have laughed. He was getting better at his “George Clooney” every day.

  Four or five replies passed through her thoughts; she settled on the quickest. “Bull,” she said. “And we’re on the clock.”

  His eyes narrowed further. “Bella—”

  “Knows and authorized. Brought in me and Sovie on it.” She fidgeted. “Djinni, I really am on the clock.”

  “Brought in the big guns—” He took the case from her before she could tighten her grip on it. “Explain while we move, then.”

  The hell— She almost told him to take a hike, but partly because she still was on the border about him scaring the crap out of her, and partly because . . . well, because . . . she didn’t argue. She just set off down the corridor at a trot, which for his longer legs was merely a fast walk, explaining in layman’s terms as best she could. “So that’s why. My family specializes in vamps. All kinds of vamps. So I’m the closest we’ve got to an expert.”

  “All kinds of vamps?” His brow wrinkled. “There’s more than one kind?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” She couldn’t resist adding, “Though none of them sparkle as far as I’m aware.”

  They reached the door to Bulwark’s private room. He opened it for her, and gave the relatively barren cube a good raking gaze as he closed the door behind her. “Room swept?”

  “To the best of our ability,” she told him, with emphasis. She didn’t tell him who the “our” was, but he was smart enough to intuit they’d had some Metis help.

  He watched her as she unpacked her kit, a mix of high-tech and antique. “Risk?”

  “High,” she told him truthfully. “But the risk is all mine and . . . dammit, it’s Bull we’re talking about. Bella will be here shortly as my monitor, and this time she’s got some folks on-call if things go too pear-shaped.”

  “Like?”

  “Sovie and Mary Ann.”

  Djinni rolled his eyes at the mention of Einhorn. “That’s a lot of help,” he said sarcastically. “Well, hell, I’m here, you might as well use me as your anchor.”

  “Uh . . . what?” She turned to look at him in complete disbelief.

  “I said, you might as well use me as your anchor.” He snorted. “It’s not as if you haven’t already infect
ed me with your magic cooties, so I’m not exactly pure anymore.”

  She was so shocked that she didn’t reply with equal sarcasm. “That . . . would be . . . amazingly helpful,” she said instead. Then, thankfully, her sarcasm returned. “Did your priest require you to do some penance or something? A hundred thousand rosaries would probably be easier.”

  He snorted. “Make with the magic, Vix.”

  Red stood aside and let Vickie begin her preparations. He assumed a relaxed posture, his arms lazily crossed as he leaned back against the wall. At first glance, one might have assumed he was bored. Laying down a square of heavy canvas, painted with a double circle and a few arcane symbols, Vickie paused and glanced up at him. His eyes betrayed him. They bore into her, watching her every move. She felt a painful flush in her cheeks as the intensity of his stare made her acutely self-conscious of everything she was doing.

  “Uh, do you want me to explain this?” she asked.

  “Just keep at it, Victrix. Time. Issue. Remember?”

  Vickie shrugged and continued to work, adding things at the corners of the square. A very heavy pillar of stone, an equally heavy copper bowl, a glass bowl with walls an inch thick that she poured a tiny amount of water into, and a cast-iron incense burner. They all looked old. Very, very old. Probably because they were very, very old. She put an LED light into the copper bowl, and a little computerized gizmo of her own design into the incense burner. Immediately a faint scent of amber filled the room. She didn’t want any real fire in here. Not with Bull on an oxygen feed.

  The Djinni stiffened up, then let out a subtle exhalation as he composed himself. That smell, Vickie thought, groaning inwardly. She had forgotten what that smell meant to him, how it might affect him, and she cursed herself silently for that. She needed him steady, focused. Still, it couldn’t be helped. The “incense” (nothing that would compromise the breathing of Bulwark or any other patient) was necessary, and they would have to put aside any misgivings if they were to succeed. If they were to save Bulwark.

  Red had, in his usual Djinni fashion, surprised her. To say he was skittish around magic was an understatement. That he would volunteer so readily to participate in this endeavor spoke of . . . what? Whatever the reason, he was trying too hard, straining to look calm when he was obviously on edge. Was it worry? For Bull? Before everything went to hell, when Bull’s team had been getting solid at last, Vickie had seen them together via her high-tech Overwatch protocols, whether at work or in the quiet times between jobs. By the end, the conflict and near insults had become banter, and the sniping had . . . almost seemed forced. They would argue, but like two old friends who thrived on getting almost on each other’s nerves without actually going over the edge. It had become clear to most everyone as well as to her that Bulwark and the Djinni had become friends.

  * * *

  Again, she paused and looked up at him. Red shifted his stance and looked away. She could see through it, he could tell, his bad attempt at nonchalance. He almost shook his head in dismay, but merely grunted. Despite it all, here he was again, at the heart of a storm. I’m such a putz, he thought. After everything, I promised myself never again, and here I am, voluntarily chaining myself in the eye of the tornado.

  He knew what she was doing, of course. The stone was to represent the element of Earth, the bowls for fire and water and so forth. He had seen similar things before, the last time he had participated in something like this, what he had promised to be the last time . . .

  He steadied himself as Vickie began to explain her setup.

  “This is mostly old-school. Older stuff in magic has more . . .” She paused to consider exactly the right world. “. . . gravity. The more times something is repeated successfully, the more you shove the odds in your favor. I prefer to shoot from the hip and use cybermancy, but I refuse to take any chances when it comes to Bull.” She pointed at her Elemental Pillars. “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. All four objects have been in my family for five hundred years, minimum. That rock for Earth, which is my prime element, dates back to the Etruscans, we think. Those are my power points, what I’ll use as my fuel lines while I execute the setup. They’ll also be my protections from anyone with magic trying to get at me while I’m working.”

  The door opened. “I’d prefer mystical Rottweilers for that,” said Bella, looking . . . odd . . . in doctor’s scrubs. “Djinni, what the hell are you doing here? The wall doesn’t need holding up.”

  Red didn’t look at her. He simply shrugged, and continued to watch Vickie.

  * * *

  Well, that’s a first, Bella thought. The jerk’s usually got his eyes all over me when I enter a room. Bella felt an odd pang, disquieted by Red’s lack of attention.

  “He volunteered as my anchor,” Vickie said. “Since we, uh . . . worked magic together, and no one else around here has, that’s a plus, but even more . . .” She managed a wry grin. “Well, for an anchor I need someone with a strong will, and I can’t think of anyone more pigheaded than the Djinni.”

  “Got that right,” Bella replied dryly. She flexed her fingers and cracked her knuckles, a bad habit from her paramedic days she still hadn’t broken. Then she checked to make sure her two panic buttons were right where she could get to them quickly, gave Bulwark another once-over to make sure nothing had changed, and plopped down on a stool between him and Vickie. “So, we ready?”

  “Did most of the prep at home.” Vickie stood in the center of the circles painted on the canvas and looked straight into Djinni’s eyes. “Speaking of which, that is what I need from you. I’m casting everything loose in order to get deep into what’s sucking Bull dry. Best picture is, we have a whirlpool and I have to go down to the bottom to plug it. I can’t concentrate on anything but that. You have to do my concentrating for me on my lifeline. It’s easy. Just think of everything that means home to you. Doesn’t have to mean home to me, just you. It’s the home part, not whose home it is.”

  “I can do that,” Red muttered, and took a deep breath.

  She gave him a real smile, not strained, not faked. “I know you can. You may have one of the strongest wills outside of a magician I’ve ever seen.”

  Home, he thought. Right, think of home, c’mon Red, old hat, just do it like before . . . NO . . . not like before. Vix has got this, she knows the score. Not like Justine. Just think of home, of home . . .

  Vickie took a deep breath. “Right. Here we go.”

  And now all that work on the parkour course showed. Her hands moved smoothly in the air as she moved in a slow, precise circle, like a tai chi practitioner crossed with a symphony conductor, sketching lines that glowed, and stayed, weaving a web of symbols all around her until it solidified into a wall. And at that moment, she stopped moving, completely, eyes open, seeing nothing, and the four objects at the corners of the canvas began to shine: deep gold, emerald, sapphire, crimson.

  * * *

  From her perspective, she was free of that imprisoning body . . . but not free, for she was already caught up in the “gravity well” that was what Harmony had done to Bulwark. It was slowed, but not stopped, a black hole in slow motion. She could have fought the pull, but that wasn’t why she was “here.” She had to let it take her; had to fall into it. That was the only way to reach the heart of the process and cut the damned thing out.

  Because a spell is a process, and not a thing. People forgot that, or never knew it in the first place. They treated spells like concrete constructions and tried to break them. That was not how it worked. Spells were things that kept going, which is why they resisted breaking. You had to interrupt the process. Once that happened, the whole mess would tangle up and fall down, and . . . and if you were very, very lucky, some of it would snap back on the person who had started it, like the end of a long and deadly bungee cord stretched too tight.

  You also had to be very careful that none of those bungee cords snapped back on you, or (if someone else was involved) the person you were trying to help. There was a l
ot of energy tied up in spells, and in magic, the laws of physics worked pretty well. All that energy had to go somewhere when the process stopped.

  She was treating this like a spell, and it was reading to her mostly like a spell.

  People always asked, “What does magic look like?” and she always had to shrug, because when you were in the Between place where real Mage-Sight took you, it looked different to everyone. She saw it as elegant fractals of symbols, numbers, and relations, all in colors that told her yet more information about what was going on. But her mother saw it as lacework. And Hosteen Stormdance, one of her mentors and her parents’ partner at the Bureau, saw it as a Hopi dance pattern.

  So this swirl of symbols whirlpooling around her told her, among other things, “This isn’t actually a spell, but it acts just like a spell, so you can treat it as a spell.”

  The black hole was very dark, and very deep indeed. But the bit of process at the bottom of it was as straightforward and as simple as she had hoped. The older a spell was, the simpler it tended to be, and the easier to deal with. Things that were natural abilities, like Grey’s ability to walk through walls, were also straightforward and simple. Primal. It made her wonder where Harmony had gotten this . . . and if it wasn’t a metahuman ability, what in the heck was it?

  Whatever . . . it was something she could handle. She dangled right on the verge of being swallowed up and looked it all over, twice and three times, just to be sure there was nothing hidden from her. She found one fiendish little trap, but it was something she had seen before—and Harmony must not have counted on someone taking this approach to saving Bulwark.

  Actually she probably counted on no one being able to save him.

  All right then. This was a running machine of sorts. She and Upyr had put a governor on it earlier, but that wasn’t going to choke the feed off for much longer. The fractals told her that the whole process was putting such strain on the choke point that it was going to shatter soon.