Bonds and Broken Dreams (Amplifier 2)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

Ironically, she had managed to force my hand into doing just that. She just hadn’t expected that I could kill as well as amplify by touch.

  Another pocket of hazy orange light drew me toward the living room, which sat opposite the dining room. Though I wanted to rush in and rip Opal from the horror she was trapped within, it would have been stupid to not clear the final front room of the house.

  I slipped around the edge of the doorway, crouching to make myself a smaller target as I blinked to adjust my eyes. Paisley snarled, shouldering past me and knocking me to the side. I tripped over something, almost losing my footing.

  Paisley lunged to the left.

  “Stop!” a man shouted. A wall of magic slammed into place, also to my far left.

  Paisley snarled and spat. She had someone cornered behind a barrier. I looked down.

  I had tripped over Jenni Raymond. She’d been thrown just inside the door, still naked and unconscious. As I bent over her, though, I could feel the muted hum of her magic. So she was healing.

  “Call the damn dog off,” Isa said with a snarl, magic heavy in his command.

  Holding both knives in one hand, I placed the other hand on Jenni’s upper chest, feeling the steady beat of her heart. Then I glanced over to my left. Paisley was double her regular size and completely blocking my sight of the corner of the room. A tight column of dark-blue magic rose in front of her.

  “Check on Opal please,” I said.

  She grumbled, but then stepped back into the front hall.

  Isa Azar was crouched in the corner of the room. A trickle of blood ran down his forehead from his hairline. A wound that could have easily been self-inflicted. He grimaced, meeting my gaze. “This has gone spectacularly badly.”

  “Yes,” I said, forcing myself to take in the rest of the room. The typical, well-worn living room furniture had all been pushed to the walls. Tyler Grant was disemboweled in the center of a pentagram, his remains arranged similarly to those of his father. The same dark magic streamed from the five candlelit points of the pentagram.

  Jenni Raymond’s shoulder was only inches from one of the lines bisecting the room. I tugged her farther away.

  “Ruwa’s dead?” Isa asked.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I felt the bond break.”

  “Which is why you’re currently cowering in a corner.”

  He sneered at me, but didn’t deny my assessment. Losing the tie to Ruwa would have ripped a ton of magic from the sorcerer — as was holding the barrier spell he was using to stop Paisley from tearing out his throat.

  I looked around the room. “You’re unbelievable, sorcerer.”

  He laughed darkly. “That’s rich coming from you.” He pinned his gaze on me. “Yeah, I finally figured out what the fuck you are. Some genetic experiment let loose on the world. Honestly, I thought the rumors were crazy.”

  “Didn’t Silver Pine whisper all her secrets to you? Or does every woman play you?”

  He snorted. “You think Silver wasn’t oath bound? Oh, she laid hints. And talked shit about my father, but …” He shook his head.

  “What’s the spell set up around the house, Isa?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “It takes two of us to cast it,” he murmured. “Two of us to hold it. I could replace the mundanes with the witch and the shifter. That might give us a couple of hours.” He eyed me. “But you aren’t going to allow that.”

  “No. What’s to stop me from killing you?”

  “I doubt even you could get through my shield.”

  “You misjudge my abilities. Again.”

  “Perhaps. But kill me, and the house will only be swallowed faster.”

  Swallowed …

  Icy shards of fear fissured through my chest.

  That sounded a lot like what Christopher had seen when he cast cards after the sorcerers had arrived on our doorstep.

  “What’s to stop me from walking away and bringing the full force of the witches Convocation down on your head?”

  “Is that a call you’d make, amplifier?”

  “You kidnapped a witch from the Academy.”

  “Ruwa. Ruwa kidnapped a witch. And you took care of her, didn’t you?”

  “Then what the hell are you waiting for?”

  He laughed. “Aiden. I’m waiting for Aiden to come for you.”

  “Still? You’re going to die and all you want to do is take your baby brother with you?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I just said it takes two of us to cast.” He gestured toward the pentagram.

  My heartbeat ratcheted up, then eased. “So it takes two of you to dispel?”

  “Indeed.”

  “How do I get Opal out from the strands of the pentagram in the dining room?”

  “Opal?”

  “The witch you kidnapped, asshole.”

  Isa shook his head. “She’s not tied to the spell. Yet. Though you’re only going to speed up all our deaths if you don’t let me switch out the mundanes.”

  Carefully holding the knives away from her, I gathered Jenni in my arms, straightening up — and noting a flicker of confusion from Isa, who obviously hadn’t realized how strong I was. Which made him a falsely arrogant idiot. What else would he expect from a so-called genetic experiment?

  I left the room, stepping into the smothering darkness once again, then feeling my way to the entrance. I set the still-unconscious Jenni to one side of the front door, then hesitated to leave her. If she woke up, the last thing she would remember was being tortured in the cage. Being completely blind on top of that would be utterly disconcerting.

  “Paisley?” I whispered. Then, realizing I had no reason to be circumspect, I called out louder. “Paisley? I’m by the front door.”

  I waited for a moment, readying to call again just as the demon dog brushed against me. I wrapped my hands around her neck, then scratched lightly behind her ears. She snuffled at my shoulder. “Will you watch Jenni while I get Opal?” I asked her. Then I raised my voice. “You have my permission to eat the sorcerer if he sets one foot out of the living room.” I didn’t know if Isa could hear me, or if the black magic dampened sound as well as light.

  Paisley chortled, darkly delighted.

  “Really?” Jenni groaned from a few inches to my right. “Eating a person seems like an extreme reaction.”

  I shook my head at her, though she couldn’t see me. “The so-called person in question has sacrificed Peter and Tyler Grant, shifter. In a way you really don’t want to see.”

  Jenni hissed, muttering something under her breath that got swallowed by the darkness between us.

  “Stay here with Paisley, please,” I said. “I just need to get Opal, then we’ll get out.”

  “And leave the Grants?”

  “I’m not having a discussion about dead mundanes with you right now, shifter.”

  Jenni muttered under her breath again. Then she said, “Take Paisley. I’m fine here.”

  I took her at her word, tracing the wall back to the open door to the dining room. Paisley occasionally brushed a tentacle against my wrist or leg.

  I stepped through into the dining room, avoiding looking at Peter Grant disemboweled in the pentagram. There was nothing I could do for him. And if I believed Isa, the spell was about to fail, so I needed Opal and Jenni far away from the house before it collapsed.

  That the house was going to collapse was a given — Christopher had apparently seen as much.

  Opal was crouched by the black shadow emanating from the nearest point of the pentagram. The young witch was holding her hands inches from the dark magic, presumably trying to assess it before stepping over it.

  She looked up as I entered. She’d shaken off whatever had been holding her, the magic making her fixate on the dead body in the pentagram when I’d first entered the dining room. Presumably a spell of some sort.

  Paisley skulked toward the witch, tentacles snapping and writhing. The dark magic smothering the house was disconcerting for the de
mon dog as well.

  “Hey,” Opal whispered. Her eyes were wide, glistening with witch magic and unshed tears.

  “Found you,” I said.

  Her face crumpled so quickly that I thought I’d said something wrong. But then she nodded and smiled. The expression was full of pain.

  “Isa said you aren’t tied to the spell. Yet.”

  “So I can step over it?”

  I hesitated.

  Paisley snapped her head back toward the open doorway, growling.

  “Yes,” Isa Azar said as he settled his shoulder against the doorjamb.

  “I promised Paisley she could eat you, sorcerer, if you left the living room.”

  He sighed. “I didn’t get the memo. And since you killed Ruwa, I have to check her … work.” He indicated the pentagram with a tilt of his head.

  “Ruwa is dead?” Opal asked quietly. “That’s … she’s the one who pretended to be my mother, right?”

  “Apparently.” Isa stepped into the room, keeping to the left and out of my way. He crossed through the black lines of magic slashed across the hardwood floor without triggering any repercussions. Though possibly only because he’d been the one to cast it.

  “Emma?” Opal asked. “You killed her?”

  “I did. Step back, please.”

  She did so. I steeled myself, then deliberately took a step across the line. Nothing happened. Leaving a foot on either side, both knives in one hand again, I scooped Opal up in my arms and stepped back over the line.

  Nothing reached out to try to swallow us. Whatever the spell was that had cost Peter and Tyler Grant their lives, it wasn’t a boundary or a ward of any kind.

  Without a further word to the sorcerer pacing the edges of the pentagram, I stepped back through to the hall. Isa had been keeping a wary eye on Paisley. The demon dog followed me, grumbling darkly.

  Still carrying Opal, who was clinging to my neck so tightly that she likely would have choked any other Adept, I made it back to the front door.

  I shifted the knives again to the arm I had underneath Opal, then reached forward with my right hand. “Jenni.”

  “Here.” The shifter stepped forward, running her hand up my arm as she found me in the dark, feeling me carrying Opal. “Is she okay?”

  “Yes,” Opal said. “But it’s hard to breathe, isn’t it?”

  “Jenni, can you take her?”

  “I can walk,” the witch insisted.

  I set Opal down on her feet, making certain that Jenni found and held her hand. Then I reached back for Paisley, making certain that she had a tentacle around Opal’s other arm.

  “I’m okay, Emma,” Opal said. “You found me. I’m okay.”

  I shoved away the fissure of irrational terror that Opal’s words opened up in my chest. It wasn’t like she was tempting fate, because I didn’t wholly believe in such things.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jenni growled. Apparently, she’d changed her mind about leaving the mundanes behind. I surmised that even five minutes of suffocating in the magic that permeated the ground floor was enough to drive away her altruistic tendencies. Or she’d stepped back into the living room and laid eyes on what was left of Tyler Grant.

  I found the door handle, opening the door and stepping out onto the front patio.

  Except instead of the defunct, snow-covered pig farm I’d expected, I found myself staring into a pocket of hell on earth.

  Chapter 9

  Completely shocked — possibly for the first time in my life — I stumbled outside, still wearing only a suit jacket and with a chef’s knife in each hand. The covered wooden front patio and the house behind me were all that remained of the Grant property.

  “What the fuck?” Jenni muttered behind me. She was still naked, and showed no sign of caring.

  The entire front and side yards, extending as far as I could see, had been transformed into some sort of marsh. A blackened wasteland. Skeletal trees and low formations of rock jutted out of a sea of seething blackness. A sheen of blood red highlighted the horizon, as if a different sun had just set. In the north.

  Jenni stepped forward, her gaping mouth reminding me to close my own. The shifter inadvertently dragged Opal with her to the top of the three concrete stairs that descended into the blackened mire.

  I grabbed her upper arm. She snarled at me, the green of her shifter magic flashing through her eyes.

  “Easy,” I said, forcing my rational self to kick into gear as well. “It’s a dimensional pocket.”

  She relaxed under my hand, enough that I let her go. I reached back for Opal, tucking her against the house next to the door. “Keep in contact with the side of the house at all times, okay?”

  The young witch nodded, eyes wide with fear.

  Paisley paced the length of the patio, snarling.

  Jenni crouched to eye the three concrete stairs, assessing the way the world just abruptly dropped off into darkness under them. “Do you smell that? Oily, burned, rotten wood.”

  I nodded. “In the house as well.”

  She glanced at me, grimacing. “Demons.”

  I scanned the area that should have been the driveway and front yard of the Grant property. I couldn’t see any creatures in the immediate vicinity. “Yeah. I’ve seen this sort of magic before. Just never on this scale.”

  “We’re trapped, then? You said it was a dimensional pocket. So how do we get out?”

  I glanced toward the open door at my back. The interior of the house was still completely swallowed in darkness. The windows of the living room and dining room on either side of the door showed no hint of the candles I knew to be burning within.

  “I mean, there has to be some sort of logic to it,” Jenni continued. “A border. We should be able to walk out, right?”

  “Paisley and me, maybe,” I said. “If I had my blades.”

  “I’m not some liability, Emma,” Jenni snarled.

  I just gave her a look, then nodded toward Opal. The young witch was still on her feet, pressed up against the house, but having a hard time not looking utterly terrified.

  “This isn’t my kind of magic,” I muttered.

  “Can the sorcerer undo it?”

  “He says not.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Staring death in the face usually weeds out the liars. But no, not completely.”

  An oozing, black-clawed, black-scaled limb reached out of the darkness, slithering under the railing. It made a grab for my ankle.

  Paisley pounced, clamping down on the limb and tearing it from whatever body it was connected to with a vicious yank. It crumbled into ash in her mouth.

  Opal moaned.

  “No,” I said. “That’s good. Ash means that the house is still in the proper dimension. Our dimension. Just don’t step off the patio.”

  Jenni’s face had frozen into a grimace. “Okay, then.” She reached her hand toward me, silently asking for one of my chef’s knives.

  I gave it to her, then I reached over and pressed my hand against her upper chest. “The cage drained you.”

  Jenni swallowed harshly, then nodded. The gesture was stiff, forced. “You think … you want to give me a boost, like before?” She tried to smile, but the expression twisted on her face. “I don’t think being a … being on four legs would be all that helpful right now.”

  Paisley snorted indignantly, prowling along the patio again, but staying closer to Opal as she paced.

  “I can’t force you to transform —”

  Jenni gave me a withering look.

  “Okay, I wouldn’t try to force you to transform. Last time, your magic rose up to heal you, to counter the black witch’s spell.”

  Jenni laid her hand over mine where it touched her chest. “I hope your bed is big enough for three, because I might have to start sleeping over if you pump more magic into me.”

  I laughed quietly. Then without wasting any more time, I reached for Jenni’s muted magic. But coaxing it gently forward this time,
rather than frantically pumping it into her like I’d needed to do in order to save her life in the woods.

  She gasped quietly. The green of her shapeshifter magic glinted from her normally light-brown eyes.

  I twined my power through hers, buoying it, building it from within.

  Jenni swayed, still holding my hand to her chest. She spaced her feet farther apart, firming her stance and holding my gaze steadily.

  I intensified my output, allowing my magic to flow more freely into her. Her mouth parted, revealing the tips of her normal human teeth. The green of her magic overtook her eyes.

  She stretched out her knife hand past my shoulder, flexing at the elbow. “Oh.” She panted lightly. “I see. Okay. How can you … aren’t you draining your own magic when you do that?”

  “I have a large reserve.”

  She nodded, dropping her free hand from mine so she could clench and unclench it. She stepped back to press herself against the house on the opposite side of the open front door from Opal.

  Magic shifted to my left, and Isa Azar stepped through the doorway. He eyed the scene with a smug smile as he sauntered past me to stand at the railing. Proud of himself, of his mastery of magic. “What’s your next move, amplifier? I’d say we have ten minutes.”

  “Well,” I said, matching his smug tone, “I figure I have two choices. Drain you down, then use you and Ruwa’s corpse to fuel the pentagrams …”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s the second option?”

  Magic shifted across the blood tattoo on my T3 vertebra. Christopher’s magic. The clairvoyant was near. I grinned, both relieved and completely ready to unleash everything I’d been holding at bay in order to focus on getting Opal and Jenni out of the house alive.

  Isa stiffened from whatever he read in my expression. He raised his hands, opening his mouth to hit me with magic I could already feel him calling forth.

  I lunged for him, leading with my open hand, not the knife.

  Then something slim but dreadfully strong hit me from the side, coming through the open door to the house without any warning. I flew off the patio, losing hold of my knife.

  Opal screamed.

  I landed hard, rolling through a sickeningly dense layer of miasma before coming up onto my feet, facing the house. Standing within the calf-high oily swamp, a slick, seething layer of darkness clung to me. I could hear the clicking of claws and the snapping of jaws nearby, but couldn’t see the demons I knew were anticipating tearing me limb from limb.