Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2)

by Becca Mills

  I rolled onto my left side. That didn’t go so well: my right arm dragged along after me, causing a pain spike so extraordinary I nearly passed out.

  Once I could think again, I realized I needed to use my left arm to hold my right one against my body so it wouldn’t move so much.

  That accomplished, I managed to look around. I couldn’t see Williams, couldn’t see anyone.

  No, wait. Williams was on the ground behind me. Awkwardly, I scooted around and took a closer look at him. He was moving a little. Not dead, at least.

  I looked for Kara. Lord knows we needed a healer.

  There was no sign of her.

  Things were different. The trees all around me were leafless and leaning drunkenly or flattened. The ground looked disturbed — leaf matter stripped away, boulders shifted. Everything was very quiet. The scene didn’t make sense. My brain was working slowly, so I let it be and looked again for Kara.

  Instead I found the youngling. It was advancing on us through the maze of broken trees.

  “Williams.”

  He didn’t respond. The thing got closer.

  “Shit! Williams!”

  I held onto my bum arm and started kicking at him. I couldn’t think what else to do. I was defenseless, and I couldn’t possibly run away fast enough through the drunken forest.

  After I kicked him a few times, Williams groaned and moved, then started trying to sit up. He didn’t look to be in good shape.

  “It’s coming!”

  That got his attention. He lifted himself up woozily, swaying. One of his pupils was bigger than the other.

  “Come on, come on,” I muttered, scooting as close to him as I could.

  He reached out and grabbed my bum arm, which was so not what I wanted him to do. Maybe my scream helped wake him up a little, because he drew on me and managed to put up a barrier. It hurt, but not as much as it had before. Perhaps the thought of the alternative was helping me be open. Or maybe I was just numb.

  The youngling slowed when Williams’s barrier went up, but it kept on coming, slipping through the downed trees and over the disturbed ground.

  It reached us and began to attack the barrier. Williams started to shake. I could feel how tenuous his control was.

  I sat there awkwardly on the forest floor, watching the seething underneath of the thing plastered against the barrier.

  I was so exhausted and in such pain that it was hard to be all that scared. In truth, disgust was the stronger emotion — after all I’d been through, I was going to die by being turned into a human Slurpee, and I was going to be with a loathsome person when it happened.

  The defensive barrier definitely gave the fragment more trouble than the containment barrier had, but the thing was strong, and Williams just wasn’t all there. I could feel him struggling to focus. Increasingly, the particles in the barrier escaped his attention, and the fragment began to make headway.

  There was nothing I could do to help him. All my perception of the working was really his. I had nothing to give except raw power, and that was only helpful if he was capable of putting it to use.

  And eventually, he wasn’t.

  The fragment broke through the barrier with an excruciating shock. Williams collapsed against me, knocking me down and pinning me there. Waves of pain lapped through me, and the world swam out of focus. I watched the fragment in the air above me, now itself, now just a wavery smudge, now gone.

  Where was it?

  When was I going to be a Slurpee?

  I lay there, quite at a loss. I couldn’t see anything at all.

  Then I realized my eyes were closed. That was the problem.

  I opened them and looked up into the bright morning. I saw dark hair and brown eyes shot through with gold.

  “Elizabeth Joy Ryder,” Cordus said.

  Chapter 7

  “Okay,” Kara said, rubbing sanitizer on her hands. “How do you feel? Any owies?”

  I was in the estate’s infirmary, resting up after being healed. I’d had a ton of bruises, a dislocated shoulder, a mild concussion, and, more surprisingly, two fractured vertebrae in my back.

  I’d been brought in a couple hours earlier, treated, and then left alone to wonder what the hell had happened out there. All I’d been told was that my friends were okay.

  “I’m fine.”

  She looked at me suspiciously.

  “Really. The pain’s gone.”

  “Good,” she said. “We’ll still keep you here ’til tomorrow morning.”

  She put her hands on me, and her eyes got that far away look that meant she was using her healing gift to examine me.

  “Shouldn’t I go see Lord Cordus?”

  I was sort of surprised he hadn’t come to see me, actually.

  “You want to see him?”

  “No, of course not.” I felt myself flushing. “I never want to see him.”

  Cordus was the last person Kara ever wanted to see. He was fond of using his gift for mental manipulation to take advantage of people sexually. I’d seen him toy with Kara, and I knew he’d done a lot more than toy with her behind closed doors. She hated him.

  He’d never done that to me, though — never taken advantage of me.

  “It’s just that he needs to know what Helen Sturluson said,” I said, feeling lame.

  “I think Andy and Theo can handle that, Beth. They were there too.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.”

  Kara shifted the blanket and sheet aside and ran her hands gently over my abdomen, humming softly.

  “Can I at least have a pillow?”

  Her humming paused. “Nope.” She picked up the tune where she left off, looking down at me and smiling at my annoyance.

  I stewed for a bit. Then it occurred to me that Kara was my friend, and I was being an ass.

  “What’re you humming?”

  “Rubén Blades.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Seriously, white girl?”

  “Kara. You know I don’t know anything about music.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ll send you some, okay? It’s the best thing you’ll ever hear.”

  “That’s cool. Thanks.”

  She took her hands off me and tucked the bedclothes back in. Then she sighed and sat down on the visitor’s chair next to my bed.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Yeah, just tired.” She studied me with a serious expression. “Beth, you’re lucky to be alive. When Williams’s barrier went … I’ve never seen anything like it. It was so bright, I couldn’t see anything for a couple minutes.”

  “It exploded?”

  “Yeah. Flattened everything for a quarter mile. Thank god the estate’s barrier held and that we were behind it. We owe Gwen our lives — all of us. Innin’s people too. If she hadn’t ordered us through … well, none of us could’ve made a personal barrier that’d stand up to something like that.”

  I lay there, shocked speechless. I thought back to the struggle to hold the barrier, how the youngling pulled and Williams pulled back. What had Williams been pulling on, exactly? I felt like I’d understood it at the time, but now I couldn’t remember.

  “Williams should’ve just let it go,” I said. “It would’ve dissipated. Letting it explode … that’s awful.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “It’s hard to know when to let a working go, when you’re in the thick of things. If we could pinpoint the right moment, we’d never have them get busted.”

  Kara didn’t have a problem with Williams. They were both stationed in Minneapolis, so they worked together quite a bit. Maybe it was stretching it to say they were friends, but they were on good terms, and she seemed to respect him. I could only assume she didn’t truly know what he did for Cordus and how much he enjoyed doing it.

  “So why didn’t the explosion kill me? I was right there.”

  “Williams got a protective barrier up in time. Must’ve been a rough ride, though. Based on where we found you, you guys must’ve boun
ced up the outside of the estate barrier and then rolled back down it at a different angle.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah. Pretty bad head injury, but he’ll be fine.” She paused. “I really wish you hadn’t had to go through that. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  I hadn’t been thinking of that, but as soon as I did, I got angry. I’d never experienced such pain before. The memory of it brought a wave of nausea. Why the hell hadn’t Williams let Kara sedate me? It was just cruel. The idea that I had to be alert to control my gift was absurd — nothing but a lame excuse. I had no control over it in any state.

  I remembered Graham calling Williams a sadist. Truer words were never spoken.

  Kara was watching me and looking upset, so I tried to pack away my anger. There was nothing I could do with it right now, and I sure didn’t want her to feel guilty. It wasn’t her fault.

  “It’s okay.”

  It came out funny, since it really wasn’t okay, and I can’t lie worth a darn.

  We sat there awkwardly for a few moments.

  I cleared my throat. “So, Lord Cordus got back in the nick of time?”

  “Yep. I guess he got to the estate just before the explosion. Rushed out there on horseback.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Rode up on a fucking white stallion.”

  The only white horse in the estate’s stables was a gelding, but I didn’t quibble.

  “Zion and Liz had a line on you guys, but we couldn’t get to you. There was just so much debris in the way. So the bossman gallops up, right? He’s all like, ‘Where is Miss Ryder!?’ and Zion points the way. So he hauls me up on the horse’s ass and takes off, just like in some old movie. The horse reared and everything. So we go charging over to you, and the debris just disappears in front of us the whole way.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yep. Beats me what kind of working that was. The ground in front of us just turned into this nice green lawn.”

  “Huh.”

  “So we find you, right? Williams is out, but you’re half-conscious. That Thirsting Ground thing’s right there — like, right next to you. It’s about to eat you. So Lord Cordus jumps off the horse and does battle with it.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “Did you just say ‘does battle’?”

  “Honey, there’s no other word for it. It flew right at him, and he just stared at it and held it off. It was a duel. That lasted for like a minute. Then he started trying to put barriers around it, but it kept breaking out.”

  “Wait, it got away?”

  “No, he got it in the end. Just seemed to take him a while to find the right thing to hold it.”

  Something knotted up hard and tight inside of me began to relax a little.

  “Where is it now?”

  “Beats me. On the estate somewhere is my guess. I sure as hell hope he can hold it.”

  “Me too. So he didn’t put it through the carven strait?”

  She shook her head. “Williams didn’t have it on him. We haven’t been able to find it. Might’ve been destroyed in the explosion.”

  “Wow.”

  If that was true, Graham was trapped in that isolate forever. But he was also safe from Cordus.

  “You know,” Kara said, “if the fragment wanted to get into the estate, what better way than to let itself get caught and brought inside?”

  “Playing a trick like that would take some serious brain power. Sturluson said it had no mind, couldn’t learn.”

  “Yeah.” Kara shivered. “Let’s hope she was right. Anyway,” she said, picking up the thread of the story, “once the fragment was squared away, we did a little healing to stabilize you guys and brought you in. You were pretty out of it — kept saying you were dreaming and talking to some guy.” She laughed. “Sounded sort of sexy, actually.”

  “Um … I don’t remember any of that. Must’ve been the head injury.”

  “Probably. Lots of people do a sort of broken-record thing after a concussion. Get stuck on one thing and just repeat it, even if it doesn’t make much sense.”

  I nodded and hoped Kara was too preoccupied to notice how red I’d turned.

  I examined my two pairs of tan slacks, trying to remember which was more flattering. I held them up in front of the mirror. Well, I wasn’t about to go through my closet trying stuff on. I put the boot-legged ones back in the closet. The straights were fine.

  But which shoes? I didn’t have that many pairs, and I had a feeling none would be quite right. I put that issue off and started looking through my tops. The navy, cap-sleeved blouse was nice. But tan and navy … that was so boring. I pulled out a maroon knit. It was perfect for my mother’s silver figaro necklace, which looked nice with my hair. And speaking of my hair —

  What am I doing?

  I was never like this. To me, clothes were what you did so people didn’t call the cops because you were naked.

  I stared into the mirror and forced myself to admit I was acting this way because Cordus was the person I was about to see.

  He’s not your knight in shining armor or your cowboy in a white hat, I reminded myself, and he’s certainly not your boyfriend.

  He was a rapist, a slaver, and a master of hired killers. There was nothing admirable about him.

  Yeah, and he’s also the guy you’ve been having dreamland sexy-time with for months.

  And it wasn’t all dreams. Mostly, but not all.

  I remembered the last time I’d seen him in the flesh — standing too close, his lips tracing the line of my jaw, his hand brushing against my breast. Desire flared deep in my body, and I shivered.

  Jesus. I really needed to get my head on straight. Cordus wasn’t some romance figure who was going to turn out to be a good guy underneath a crusty exterior. If I didn’t remember that, I was going to be in a world of hurt.

  Besides, what I really needed to do with Cordus was share information. I needed to tell him I’d found a living link to the lost art of putting workings into objects. If the Thirsting Ground had absorbed some of the capacity of that man long ago, maybe it could do the same thing. Who knows — maybe Limu had learned the skill from Sturluson. Even if there was no connection, who knows what else Sturluson could tell us. Clearly, she was old. Maybe she knew something that would help us find Limu’s weapon — or at least figure out what it was.

  I finished dressing without looking in the mirror.

  I wish I could say I felt cool and collected by the time I got to Cordus’s office. Unfortunately, my heart was pounding, and I felt like I couldn’t quite fill my lungs. I stood there for a few seconds, taking deep breaths, and then knocked.

  I heard him say “enter” through the thick wood and opened the door.

  The familiar room unfolded before me: dark wood, old books, fine carpets, and Cordus himself, sitting at his massive desk, a phone to his ear. It all looked just the same, like the intervening months hadn’t happened.

  He slid a thumb over the phone’s mic. “Miss Ryder. Come in.”

  I stepped in and closed the door behind me. Light streamed through the windows behind the sitting area at the far end of the room. A single small brass lamp cast a pool of light on the papers spread across the desk. Otherwise, the space was dark, cavelike.

  Cordus gestured to one of the chairs in front of the desk. He smiled at me slightly as I sat, his eyes lingering on me for a moment. Then he said, “If you will excuse me,” and stood, walking over toward the windows to finish his call.

  I tried not to watch him as he paced slowly back and forth, but I couldn’t help myself. His face was all contours and angles, which made the sensual mouth all the more striking. The light fell across his features, rendering them black and white. He tipped his head, listening silently, and his glossy black hair fell forward toward his face in distinct locks. One of them brushed his slightly aquiline nose. His body looked lean but strong. Every movement was balanced and graceful, yet unstudied.

  He was, in a word,
perfect.

  He must have made this form, I reminded myself. It’s “perfect” because he’s been tweaking it for more than a thousand years. He’s sex on a stick because it serves his purposes.

  My brain nodded soberly. The rest of my body rolled its eyes and turned up the music.

  “I understand the situation,” he said. “Nevertheless, you are needed here. Now.”

  I found myself standing and stopped, confused and embarrassed.

  Then I got it. There’d been compulsion in those words. I’d caught the edge of it.

  Whoever was on the other end of the line was probably high-tailing it to the nearest airport at that very moment.

  He closed the phone and looked up at me, his face gentle. Then he held out a hand.

  It wasn’t a “please be seated” kind of gesture. It was a “come take my hand” one.

  I felt myself flush.

  Friggin’ pale skin. Honest to god, I was the world champion of turning tomato-red.

  I walked over, focusing on not falling down, and slid my hand into his.

  He tugged gently on me, guiding me to one of the two armchairs. He sat down in the other. He didn’t let go of my hand for several long beats. The chairs seemed a lot closer together than they used to be. He was right there. Like, right there. I could hear him breathing.

  “Please forgive my rudeness. That call was important.”

  “Of course. I mean, it’s no problem. I mean, of course they’re important. Your calls, I mean. All your calls. I’m sure.”

  Jesus. Be a little more awkward, could you?

  He smiled.

  He’d never really smiled at me before. Like, really smiled. I sat there, speechless, my brain coughing and stuttering like an old lawnmower.

  “Miss Ryder,” he said, “you alone within my household may have guessed where I have been these last months.”

  That got my brain up and running again.

  “Investigating Eye of the Heavens?”

  “Exactly.”

  What I’d wanted to tell him sprang to mind.

  “Hey, we found out the Thirsting Ground was created by someone who could fix workings in objects. Created by accident, I mean.”

  The story Helen Sturluson had told tumbled out of me.