Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  With any luck, there would be time to ponder that later. Right now, we had wolves and coming. I spun my magic up high pushing it out for me in a lightning flash of color that flickered and forked, slicing through the air until it hit both of the wolves.

  One of them froze in his tracks, but my magic was weak, and the other yell and left a way from the singeing pain.

  Seeing that I was down to one attacker, Rafe spun around to help Coit with his four. I tied off the holding spell, hoping it would last until we dealt with the rest of the threat, and turn my attention to the other wolf, who now approached me with more warily, hunkered down and stomping back and forth rather than jumping for me.

  He was looking for an opening. I hoped he didn’t know enough about magic to realize what that misfired spell in his direction meant. I steeled myself to pull the magic from my own body, ready to ignore the pain that was about to Lance through me.

  When I sent my senses questing for that magic, though, I found another source.

  It seemed to float behind me, deep and blue and calm. Time slowed down around me as it always did when I tapped into the supernatural elements that allowed me to use my genetic abilities.

  My own magic—the only magic I’ve ever drawn from—was lighter than what I felt now. In the magical equivalent of dipping a toe into a pool of water, I reached out for just the tiniest taste. And before I knew what was happening, I was swept into that magic, as if into a raging river that 1 me around and around in circles, leaving me dizzy and soaked.

  In between one heartbeat and the next, this liquid magic submerged my paranormal senses. Everything about it was completely sensual, almost sexual. My nipples hardened and even in the midst of battle I grew wet and slippery inside and out. It was all I could do to keep from moaning in ecstasy. My eyes rolled back in my head and I closed my eyes for only the length of that heartbeat.

  When I opened them again and focused on our attackers, it was with complete concentration and precision.

  My lupine opponent sensed the sudden change in the air around me and leapt toward my throat.

  I barely had to spool anything. Blue crackling magic shot out of me as if propelled by one of the firearms that periodically fell through the Rift, slamming so hard through the Wolf that he didn’t even have time to make a sound. And instead of hanging in the air, as he would have if held by one of my usual spells, he fell to the ground into pieces, sliced in half by the power that beam.

  I didn’t have time to consider what it meant. Checking to make sure the other wolf was still contained in my first spell, I turn to help Coit and Rafe, only to find that they had already dispatched to of the four attacking wolves on their side and were each engaged with the other.

  Rafe had taken his full wolf form while I wasn’t looking and for an instant I feared that I wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from the other wolves. Then I realized I knew exactly which wolf he was—the one with the bright blue aura glowing around him.

  Somehow, Rafe was the source of that deep well of magic I had tapped into.

  Seemed only fair that I should use it to help them.

  I took a step toward the side of the road, trying to get a clear shot at the other wolf as the two of them circled and snapped at one another.

  A sound halfway between a grunt and a cry from Coit pulled my attention away from the circling animals. He was on his back on the road, a large gray wolf standing on his chest, seeming almost to laugh at him.

  My reaction was instantaneous. Without even thinking about it, I flashed more of that blue lightning through the air.

  Will shapes magic. All my life, I’d been taught that. I knew how to spool up spells and control them. I knew that it took effort to create and direct a spell. I knew that magic had to be coaxed out, defined and directed.

  In that instant, everything I knew fell away from me.

  I did not consciously direct the energy I slammed into the Wolf.

  I didn’t have to.

  When the magic bolt hit it, the wolf froze without making a sound.

  And then it exploded—not like something hit with fire, but as if every molecule of its being had liquefied and blown apart in the same instant. A fine mist of blood droplets coated everything in a ten-foot radius.

  The Wolf fighting against Rafe stopped its headlong dash toward him, straightening its forelegs and skidding to a halt. The other wolf, still trapped in its magical equivalent of the cage, rolled its eyes around to look from one of us to the other.

  With the flick of a single finger, I blew apart the wolf attacking Rafe.

  Now Rafe and Coit both watched me warily, but when I turned around to the final Wolf I said, “Go back to your pack. Tell them what’s happened here and that if any of them follow us again, I will destroy all of you. Do you understand?”

  The wolf couldn’t answer, but I held his gaze as I dispelled the holding energy to set him free. He nodded once and then backed away from me without breaking eye contact.

  As soon as possible, he turned tail and fled. I hope that would be the last we would see of him or his pack.

  I turned around to find both men watching me with wide eyes, Rafe back in his naked, human form.

  “So,” I said, rubbing my palms together both to reabsorb any leftover magic and to eliminate blood spatter from them, “I think that went fairly well. Are we ready to go again?”

  They both nodded, and Rafe began putting on his clothes again. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that despite having pulled in my magic, I still saw that blue aura around him.

  5

  It had been after midnight when we got to the bar, and despite its intensity, the fight with the wolves had only lasted about ten minutes, so we probably only walked through the dark for about five hours. Long enough for Coit to develop about half the hangover he deserved.

  But we were covered in blood mist and exhausted, so it seemed much longer.

  We spoke only rarely. I was still listening carefully to make sure the wolves were going to give chase again.

  Coit’s misery rendered him silent.

  I didn’t know why the wolf didn’t speak. Not exactly. But I caught him looking at me out of the corner of his eye more than once, so I was certain it had something to do with the way I’d apparently pulled magic out of him.

  Every so often, I’d remember that calm, deep pool of blue, and the way it had erupted into pure power.

  His aura stayed bright blue for a long time—so long that I wondered how it could be possible that Coit didn’t see it, too.

  But slowly, it faded.

  The closer we got to Brochan City, the more closely together the towns and villages were spaced. We passed through two or three of them are way to Rafe’s secret tunnel entrance.

  It was to one of these villages that Rafe led us. Like the others, it was deserted. Unlike the others, it seemed to have escaped the worst of the Rift ravages. Many of the buildings were still perfectly intact.

  Coming up out of his drink-induced misery for a moment, Coit turned around, taking in our surroundings. The streets were narrow, the paved, and some of the former businesses that lined the central thoroughfare still have glass windows.

  “I ain’t seen anything this kept together since I fell through that hole in the world,” Coit said.

  “If it were any farther away from the Rift, it would’ve already been taken over,” Rafe agreed. “As it is, I still sometimes have to do a little defending of the territory—though I mostly leave the scaring off to the invaders themselves. People are more afraid of the rumors and the stories than they are willing to stay someplace so close to the Rift.”

  “Why do you stay here?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you.”

  He led us through a few more streets and into a small neighborhood of two-story houses that must have once belonged to the town’s wealthier residents. Rafe marched up to one made of a pale brown stone, then around to the back, where he unlocked a door with a key he carried around his n
eck.

  “Drop your bags there.” Rafe gestured at a table to one side of a large fireplace with a cook-pot hanging above it.

  “Nice kitchen,” Coit observed. “Got any food?”

  Rafe nodded. “Yeah, I’ll feed you. But first, let me show you where we’re going. Then baths, then breakfast, then sleep. We can head back out after that.”

  “In all this time, you haven’t even asked where we’re headed.” I watched the werewolf carefully for his response, but he simply grinned.

  “Don’t have to ask. If you were headed anywhere but the Rift, you would’ve said.”

  It made sense, but I spooled just a little magic in my hand, anyway.

  It would be rude to hit him with the magic you stole from him. I shushed the tiny voice inside my head.

  Coit dropped his bag, but he didn’t unload any of his weapons from their sheaths.

  We followed Rafe deeper into the house. When he opened a door to a dark staircase leading down to the basement under the house, I paused.

  “You really expect us to follow you down there?”

  Rafe shot a glance at me. “I did tell you I was taking you through tunnels.”

  “Do you have a torch?” I asked.

  “Better.” He reached inside and took an item hanging from a hook. “I have a flashlight.”

  “No, man, really?” Coit asked, breathing the words out.

  “Hardest thing has been finding batteries for it.”

  He flipped a switch on the item and a bright beam illuminated the steps before us.

  A flashlight.

  I repeated the word to myself.

  More Rift-trash, brought through by people who didn’t make it, or perhaps following through on its own to a world that didn’t know how to use it.

  We made our way down the steep stairs and into what looked like it had been a wine cellar. The far end was another door, and it was to this that Rafe lettuce. He opened it with yet another key, and when he spoke his voice echoed differently, in a way that suggested that the empty space behind the door went on forever.

  “This is at. Go straight ahead until you hit the first junction. Turn right to head toward Brochan city. Turn left to go… well, away from the Rift.”

  “How did you even find this?” I asked.

  Rafe closed the door again and locked it. “Come upstairs for breakfast and I’ll tell you.” He flashed a smile at me, showing just enough of his canines to give the grin a lupine edge.

  “I ain’t going nowhere in no tunnels until I’ve had some sleep,” Coit complained.

  “Agreed,” I said. We need to be fresh when we get to the Rift.” We all tripped up back stairs with Rafe closing up behind us. By the time I got to the kitchen I was yawning widely. But I wasn’t willing to fall asleep until I tried to figure out a little more about why this particular werewolf was helping us.

  And what it was I’d experienced with him during our battle with the wolves.

  It made sense to go with them when he was our only option. And we didn’t have much other choice—the route to the Rift that I had planned to take was too heavily infested with Rift monsters, according to everything we’d heard on the road. The rest of the werewolves were too angry with Coit to help us out at all, and I had no idea how to get to the Rift from where we were.

  That left Rafe and his tunnels.

  6

  This house was when the first things I found after I came to the Rift,” Rafe told us as we sat around his kitchen table eating toasted bread and strips of some kind of salted meat that he had made over a low fire, along with a strong, dark tea.

  He’d offered us showers with real running water. It was the first real shower I’d had since leaving home on this quest to find my brother. The water was cold, but it was indoors and sluiced the wolf-blood splatter down a drain. I considered spelling the water to heat it, but decided that truly would be a waste of my stolen magic. I did, however, take the opportunity to wash the clothes I’d been wearing, scrubbing at them with soap and stomping the blood out of my shirt and pants on the bottom of the shower stall.

  Then I wondered how long this town’s plumbing would last without a resident mage to keep it going.

  Was Rafe the one keeping it going?

  My mind spun off in a dozen different directions.

  Where had Rafe gotten his magic?

  Was Rafe also a mage? Could a shapeshifter be a mage? Or could a mage be turned by a shifter?

  There were no answers to be had in the shower, I’d finally decided, and dried myself off, joining the two men in the kitchen for breakfast.

  “Where did you come here from?” Coit asked Rafe.

  “Right outside Denver, originally, but I got pulled into the Rift on a camping trip in the Rockies. You?”

  “Dallas. Got pulled in driving late one night. Damn thing just opened in front of me. Suck me up car and everything. Rough ride, too. Being in the car probably saved my life. Cars probably somewhere still in Brochan city, too. Not that it’d do us much good.”

  Rafe nodded. “I got dropped down right in the middle of the city. I had no idea where I was what was going on. I sure as hell didn’t know that there were monsters to watch out for. I don’t think it would’ve mattered, anyway. I wasn’t here for 24 hours before I walked right into the middle of Wolf territory. The short version is one of them bit me and left me to survive or die. I survived.”

  I frowned, chewing and swallowing my bite and taking a drink of tea to wash it down. “And the tunnel?”

  “I was pretty feverish for a few days after the bite. I reeled through the city without getting into anymore trouble, God knows how, and in one of the neighborhoods, I stumbled into one of the old high-rise buildings. That’s where I found the first tunnel.”

  “First?” Coit asked. “There more?”

  “If you. I would’ve ignored it, except I finally figured out that there were things that could be hunting me. So I stumbled into it, and kept going until I came out the other side.

  “And that was here?” I waved my toast in a circle indicating the whole house.

  “Not quite.” Rafe leaned back in his chair and hooked one arm over the back as he regarded me. “No, I came out on the banks of the river. Lucky for me I did—I don’t know that I could have cooled the fever on my own. When I came to myself again, I realized I need to cross the river if I was ever going to figure out what had happened to me.”

  “When did you figure out you were a werewolf?”

  Rafe laughed. “That’s a story for another time. In fact,” he said as I yawned yet again, “the rest of this can wait, too. Suffice to say having found one tunnel, I knew what I was looking for. So once I made my way across the river I started hunting for more. Found them, and they led me here.”

  He took the last bite of his food. “Let me show you where you can sleep.”

  We followed him upstairs, where he pointed at several bedrooms. “You can take any of these.” He gave me another one of those sidelong looks. “You can share, of course, though there’s plenty of space…”

  “Oh, hell no,” Coit said. “My own room with my own bed and a door I can close on it? I am all over that.” He began opening doors and examining the available rooms.

  I tilted my head, and smiled just a little as I answered Rafe’s unspoken question. “We’re not a couple.”

  The werewolf nodded once, a glint in his eye. “Glad to hear that.”

  I dropped my gaze and chewed lightly on my bottom lip.

  The werewolf lowered his voice. “Back on the road, when we were fighting the other wolves—you felt that, too, right? I didn’t imagine it.”

  “No. You didn’t imagine it.”

  “I think it might be worthwhile to…” he paused and bit his own lip. Something about the gesture almost undid me. “To explore that,” he finished his sentence.

  I reached out and ran my thumb along his lip. A blue spark arced between us, and we both shivered, our gazes locked on each other.
>
  It had been a long time since anyone had shown any real interest in me. Or if they had, I’d been too busy in my search for Brodric to reciprocate.

  The werewolf was attractive, muscular and wiry in that way of shifters. His black hair had tiny waves in it, and his dark eyes sparked with intelligence.

  Plus, it didn’t hurt that he had saved us and offered to help us complete our Rift quest.

  Under any other circumstances, I would have seriously considered taking him up on his implied offer.

  Given my current situation? I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

  “Not tonight,” I finally brought myself to say.

  Coit poked his head out of a room. “I’m taking this one. It’s got the best bed.”

  Rafe and I jumped apart, a little guiltily, as if we’d been caught doing something inappropriate. I was sure there was more to say to Rafe—but I couldn’t think of what.

  In the end, I simply thanked him for helping us and for the room.

  And then I locked the bedroom door behind me—as much a reminder to myself as a deterrent for anyone else.

  Just in case.

  7

  I dreamed Rift-dreams that night.

  The Rift sucked me in, making me part of it, pulling me into its reality until I wasn’t even myself any longer…

  The footsteps following me wouldn’t be an issue at any other time, anywhere else in the entire city of Basnave.

  After dark in Blood Heights, though, they’re a problem. Not necessarily because I can’t take down whoever is following me. I almost certainly can.

  But I’m walking alone at night in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the whole city (second only to the Catacombs, and even I wouldn’t go down there without some heavy-duty backup).

  I don’t look dangerous. I’m a medium-sized woman with long red hair and pale skin, dressed for comfort rather than style—tonight I’m wearing a white t-shirt, black leather jacket and blue jeans, along with motorcycle boots.

  I have no visible weapons, no obvious protective symbols, no clear magical aura.