by Amie Gibbons
“His spell was trying to grab onto my regrets,” I said, voice catching without my permission.
No. No. No!
We didn’t have time for this.
But sorrow welled in my chest and I bent over with a sob, holding myself tightly.
“Lea,” Carvi said, “please. Please hold it together until I can break the spell.”
“Why?” I sniffed.
“Because the more you give in to it, the more you regret and wallow, the more power it has. Hold it off, just for now. I will be able to cut it off. But if you power it more, you’re making my job that much harder.”
“Are we in Marco’s head yet?” I asked.
He sighed. “I… not exactly, no. We’re in between the dimensions, in the bridge you built. Here, we can use the power of both.”
“Another giant screw up,” I said softly. “I ripped through the walls of reality, made a hole not even a god knows how to fix, and probably broke the universe or something.”
A laugh escaped me.
I was a screw-up.
It was all I’d ever been.
The stereotypical baby.
The one who never had any responsibilities, who never had a job in high school, who never had to give up her Friday nights to babysit, who was so stupid I lost it to a guy who’d been pressuring me when I was heartbroken over a fight I’d had with my sister, who was so weak and desperate for love, I’d gotten drunk to have sex when I didn’t want to.
The girl who threw it away.
The most precious thing I had to give to a guy.
The thing no other guy would ever have from me.
And he’d thrown me away after that.
It’d left me so damaged that here I was, over eight years later, still wishing I could go back in time to undo it.
Something whispered through the fog in my brain.
It sounded strange.
Harsh.
Pissed off.
“Ariana Kay Ryder! Come back!”
I shook my head, opening my eyes as the world snapped back.
We stood on a bridge, artic wind blasting the last of the regret fog from my mind.
The river below the twenty-foot-long bridge was a frozen ribbon twining off into darkness on either side, the banks cast in shadows and heavy with plant life.
I couldn’t tell where the light was coming in around us and I shivered, holding myself tighter than I had been even when sucked into the horrible regret spell.
The cold cut through skin, piercing my bones and making them ache with every shiver.
“Where are we?” I managed to get out through chattering teeth.
“The bridge you made between the dimensions,” Carvi said. “We don’t have long. They are already sealing themselves.”
“Oh, so this will fix itself?”
That was something at least.
But why was it so frickin cold!
“Not a good thing if we’re still here when it does, lea,” Carvi said. “Are you ready to move forward?”
I nodded, shaking so hard I was surprised my skeleton wasn’t vibrating outta my skin.
“How?” I asked.
“We have access to both dimensions right now,” Carvi said. “That means we can use the power of both to track back through Marco’s mind. If we have time, we may even be able to use it to figure out what set off the spiral in Alabama.”
“Shouldn’t we do that first?” I asked. “I get that finding the person who put the hit out on me is important, but doesn’t magical death spiral that could take out the South trump somebody wantin’ to kill me?”
Carvi’s jaw worked and I swear his hand’s tightened on Marco’s head.
“Come on, Carvi,” I said. “If this could help us stop the spiral, we’ve got to try. And that does take priority.”
“Shit,” he said. “That whole morality and helping mankind thing you’ve got going is annoying.”
“Oh, cut it out. You have that too,” I said. “I don’t know what you do, but you do some kind of work that protects humanity.”
He shot me a look I couldn’t interpret and let Marco go, waving his hand and sending the man flying behind him and off the bridge into the night.
“Where did you send him?” I asked.
“Back to the astral plane,” Carvi said.
My eyes flew wide.
“Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “He’s been driven half mad by the Asgard dimension. He isn’t going to be able to go anywhere. He’s essentially as catatonic here as he is in the real world while he’s on the astral plane.”
“He’s traumatized,” I said.
Why did that seem so important?
Red flashed behind Carvi’s head and I jerked.
Carvi must’ve seen something in my face cuz he whirled around.
“What’s that?” I asked as the red pulsed again.
“That is answering you,” Carvi said. “What were you thinking about?”
“Trauma,” I said in a small voice. “I… I thought we dealt with all my issues last week and fixed them, but in there.” I shook my head.
“They got you,” Carvi said.
I nodded.
“I thought I was fixed. I thought we went in there and went over my issues and you fixed me. Carvi, I can’t do this. I can’t feel like this. Not again. Fix me?”
He shook his head. “You can't just say ‘fix me.’ It's not like taking your car to the mechanic. I can't pop your hood or take you for a test drive to figure out where the problem is. And we can't just switch out the broken part once we find it.
“Healing emotionally is hard work. And you'll work on it, and think you're better, until it smacks you over the head out of the blue, and you'll be just as broken as when you started, and the whole thing will start all over again.”
“Then what do I do? I can't keep bashing my head against this over and over again. I can't take this. How do people do this!”
“You keep banging your head against the wall until it breaks.”
It was my turn to give him a look.
I’m not even sure what look it was, but it made him smile grimly.
“As for your other question,” Carvi said, “most people don't. Most people don't deal with their issues. They let them fester and don't change until the pain of staying the same overpowers the pain of change.
“Lea, you have already taken the most important step. You know you have a problem and you've asked for help.”
“Ha. The first step is admitting you have a problem? Kinda like AA? So what's this? Broken Hearts Anonymous?”
He grinned a full real grin. “Oh, we’ve got to find a better name than that. That's just bad.”
I smiled back. “I don’t want this weighing me down my whole life. I don’t want this to be the defining moment, that thing I never get over.”
“It won’t be. You’re dealing with it in small bites, but you are dealing with it. You have to stop beating yourself up about how long it’s been. You were suppressing it for years. It’s not like you’ve been dealing with it for eight years and still haven’t gotten over it. You suppressed it, buried it deep and covered it up after dealing with a portion of it. You have barely begun to deal with the rest of it. Cut yourself some slack.”
“And suppress it for now?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We will deal with this. And you need to. But not now. But don’t beat yourself up over it coming up at an inopportune time, because that gives it more power over you. Accept that it made an appearance and move on.”
I nodded, taking a deep breath and straightening. “I can do that. So, we go that way?”
I pointed beyond him at the flashing red thing in the distance.
“I think so,” Carvi said. “There’s something in your power calling to it.”
I walked over to him and he took my hand, sliding my arm through his and patting my hand before letting it go and walking me down the bridge.
Arm in arm like we were a couple
out for a stroll.
In the middle of a January cold snap from hell.
I shivered again, just realizing I hadn’t noticed the cold while we were talking.
“If you focus on it, it gives it more power,” Carvi said. “Just like with anything in your head.”
“Are we in my head?” I asked. “I’m still fuzzy on where exactly we are, and where our minds end and the astral plane begins.”
I looked around. “If we’re in the astral plane. Are we heading there?”
“We will be essentially on the astral plane in a moment,” Carvi said. “But you have to understand the dimensions don’t work like geography in the real world. While what you see is a hole or a bridge between the dimensions, that’s not actually what they are. They aren’t two pieces of land pushed together or bridged or whatever.”
“Then what are they?” I asked as we hit the end of the bridge and walked onto solid ground with thick iced grass that crunched under our shoes.
“They are more like spheres of influence on each other.” He snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Think of it like spilling one liquid into the other. If they were colored, the colors would mix where they touched, and there’d be swirls here and there.”
“Like our own version of the spiral?” I asked, stomach sinking.
What if I’d been the one to set off this spiral after all?
What if me ripping the walls started it and trying to fix it or something messed with time too?
Wait, did that even make sense?
“Kind of,” Carvi said as we walked into the line of dark trees, the path lighting in front of us. “But it wouldn’t be like what we’re seeing in the real world. It’d be a sphere of influence, like something that could make a spell go awry.”
I perked up.
“Unless it stays open too long, of course,” Carvi finished.
I slumped.
Crap on a cracker.
“Carvi, did I do this?” I whispered.
“Rip a hole through dimensional walls and possibly break the universe? Yes,” he said, sounding way too teasing for such serious words.
“I meant start the spiral?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That had nothing to do with you. It wasn’t close to touching you. You also made the rip in different dimensions. Whatever happened, happened in our plane of existence.”
“So if we don’t fix that hole, that’d happen here?”
“Possibly, but the hole is knitting itself up.” He closed his eyes, still walking straight with me like he could see just as well that way. “And unfortunately for us, it’s doing so fairly quickly. If we want to use the powers of both dimensions, we need to hurry.”
I stared up at him, feet still moving at a slow stroll.
“After you,” I finally said when he didn’t pick up the pace.
“I’m not the one holding us back, lea,” he said, voice holding the slightest edge of steel.
“Oh. I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you want to see?”
“What set off the spiral.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Carvi held up a hand as I opened my mouth. “I don’t mean in your words, I mean in your visualization. What are we looking for? Someone who traveled through time, ripped through dimensions, brought someone back from the dead, etcetera. We’re looking for an abomination to nature. We’re looking for someone so desperate and clueless, they did this. Or someone so evil, they didn’t care what they were doing.”
No one was truly that evil.
I believed that down to my very soul.
“We’re looking for pain,” I said. “Pain that could drive someone mad. Pain that could make even the best person do the unthinkable.”
I slipped my arm from Carvi’s and held my hands out, palms up.
And closed my eyes.
“You are water,” whispered through my brain.
Where had I heard that before?
It was recently.
I couldn’t remember who’d said it to me. If it’d even been anyone real.
But those words had been important.
“I’m water,” I whispered.
Sparkles danced on the inside of my eyelids, flowing around my hands.
Hands I could see without opening my eyes.
The trail of red sparkling river bled through my palms and flowed between the trees, lighting the landscape up bright as a rainbow day.
Did these thoughts even make sense?
Did I care?
“She’s not here,” Milo’s voice came through the streams and beams.
He sounded confused.
“She has to be,” Carvi said. “This is where they said she would come through.”
“What does that mean?”
The world stretched on forever before Carvi finally said, “I don’t know. But I swore an oath. I do not know if this breaks it.”
“They can’t hold you to your side if they couldn’t even get her here,” Milo said.
“It’s not the witches I’m worried about.”
A woman cried in the distance.
Too far to the west.
Somewhere they couldn’t hear.
Someone they couldn’t find.
But she’d made it here.
On the water.
On the magical river before it was cut off.
And Carvi knew it.
He felt it in his bones.
He knew that broken promise would come back to bite him on the ass.
“Lea,” came from somewhere far away. “Lea, you’re drifting.”
“I am water,” I whispered, not sure if he could hear me. “The water that brought her. The water you failed. The promise you broke.”
The words flowed out of me as easily as the sparkles and I giggled.
I wanted to ride a unicorn.
“Lea!” the voice was sharper now.
“Shhhhhh.” I held up one of my hands, watching it fly through the red sparkle river and leave trails. “I see the balance. I see it all. The force that flows, that keeps everything together. Milo died because of it. Karma was right, it rights itself. And I’m in it.”
Carvi sucked in a sharp breath I felt.
“I am water,” I said again, focusing on the river, following its flow.
None of this was real.
None of this made sense.
And yet, I’d never felt safer.
I wasn’t in danger here. I was made from this.
I was…
I was part of the balance.
I was a correcting weight on one end of a power vacuum.
My rip in the universe was fixing itself because it was taking power from me.
Cuz I was power.
The river of karma rode beneath me, becoming form, and I grabbed its mane.
It snorted, sprouting wings.
We flowed down, its power carrying us instead of mine.
Pictures flashed by me, too fast for me to grab hold of.
Time going by?
How deep into the astral plane were we?
Was Carvi even still here with me?
The winged horse reared, tossing me off.
I landed in the power, floating free once more.
A whirlpool spun right in front of me, coming up too fast for me to scream before I fell in.
The power pulled me under and I struggled, thrashing against it, my head breaking surface just long enough for me to breathe before it sucked me back down.
No! I screamed in my head as my lungs burned.
Wait, no, this wasn’t real.
I was made of this. It couldn’t hurt me.
I wasn’t a fighter.
I was water.
I flowed.
I breathed in, the red swirling through me as I relaxed.
Going with the current as it dragged me down.
I didn’t have to fight.
I just had to flow.
“S
how me what started this.”
I didn’t know if I said the words out loud or not.
Or even if where I was had sound at all.
Carvi was right, this was an in between place. One where the magic of both dimensions bled together.
Giving me an advantage.
Because they did different things. One worked with psychic powers to show what had been, what could be, what magic worked under the surface in the real world. The other showed the bigger picture, how everything tied together, how one drop made the world ripple.
And right now, they were working together.
So if I knew how, I could see it all.
The water sucked me further and further down.
And grief stabbed my heart.
The glow shown below, at the heart of the spiral, pain so hard and bright, if this were real, I’d have to close my eyes against it.
But the grief didn’t come from there.
It emanated all around me, swirling with the disturbed power.
But it wasn’t what the spiral was focused on.
What did that mean?
A little girl flashed in the swirls next to me.
She was maybe eleven or twelve. Just old enough to have hit that pre-pubescent growth spurt, but not enough to have anything resembling curves on her.
Beautiful child.
I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her.
She ran across a playground like kids do, no control and absolutely free.
Her shimmering picture snuffed out as quickly as it turned on.
The sparkles swirled away.
A deep red ribbon flew over my eyes, tying itself in the back like a blindfold.
And I opened my eyes.
I stood in the field of flowers and Carvi stared at me from maybe three feet away, mouth hanging open.
“I know what happened,” I said.
And collapsed in the flowers as exhaustion took me in its happy arms.
Chapter Ten
“No! I’m not staying.”
The voice pierced through my skull like a siren and I flinched away from it, ears ringing and pain stabbing through my brain with every ping.
“No!” the voice said again. “You can’t make me. I don’t have to stay and watch this. You can’t make me.”
I knew that voice.
Wasn’t it usually a lot friendlier?
Why was it so loud?
And so high with anger and pain it made me want to hug its owner?