Curse the Dawn

Chapter Six

My scream lodged in my throat as reality whited out and I was consumed by a pain so pure that it took over everything: my body, my thoughts, even my name. I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to choke me, but I couldn't even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, do something, but if I still had a hand it didn't connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead.

And then it was over.

The pain was gone between one breath and the next, leaving me shaken and very, very confused. I gasped in air and it tasted wrong, sharp and bitter, but I could breathe. My head was spinning, my nerves were stuttering like a junkie's and I could feel my heart in my fingertips. But it didn't feel like my muscles were ripping themselves loose from my bones any longer, which I counted as a plus.

I risked opening my eyes and looked down in disbelief at my unmarked hands, at my body that for some reason was not being incinerated. But once my eyes adjusted to the intense light inside the flare, I didn't have to wonder why. A familiar golden haze surrounded me on all sides, pushing against the jumping blue field, keeping it back.

The field was in the shape of Agnes' stolen ward, the one passed onto me by my mother before she died. It was given only to the Pythias or their heirs, and it was designed to be powered by the collective energy of the Circle. That wasn't true anymore—they'd cut me off as soon as they realized that it might interfere with their plans for my early retirement—but a friend had managed to fix it. He'd set it to draw from the only other power source of that magnitude available: that of my office.

It was the same pool of power that should let me shift out of here, if the null net had stopped working. I tried to access it again but went nowhere. Yet the ward burned brighter than I'd ever seen it, with an almost blinding golden light. I decided I didn't much care about the reason right now—I was just grateful for it.

Especially considering what the fissure was doing to Richardson's shields.

The column of pure energy tore through his remaining protection like it wasn't even there. For an instant the light haloed him, with every eyelash, every seam on the tailored suit, every ghostly freckle on the bridge of his nose clearly visible. He screamed, eyes opened blind and dilated, mouth wide and soundless, as light spilled through him, bright enough to give me a glimpse of dark bone inside incandescent flesh.

Then he was gone, with nothing to show that he'd been there but a few ashes that the current snatched away.

Even when I squeezed my eyes shut, the image was there, burnt in white-hot light behind my eyelids. My stomach rebelled and bile burned my throat. I pressed my arms over my stomach and waited for the same thing to happen to me, for my ward to fail, for the end. Then something hit me, sending me spinning off into the main current of the stream, jolting me back into myself, to the reality of get out, get out now!

Only I wasn't sure how.

I had a little experience with ley lines, but this no longer looked much like one. The thick bands of power that usually stayed along the outer edges were fraying, shooting electric tendrils from one side of the line to the other. Twisting surges of deadly blue fire—some as thick as a large tree trunk, others no wider than my finger—crisscrossed the corridor, forcing me to throw myself first to one side and then the other in a deadly game of dodgeball that I was sure to lose.

It was the smaller surges that were the most deadly, jittering here and there so quickly that they were almost impossible to avoid. They turned the previously stable corridor into a leaping, burning mass of flame, spotted by dark specks where the war mages' bodies blocked out the light. One shimmering band hit a mage who had almost caught up with me, exploding his protective shell and sending the blazing body straight at me.

He struck my ward like a bird hitting the windshield of a speeding car and exploded—there was no other word for it. The smell of burnt meat reached me, drowning out the harsh tang of the ley line's air as flaming pieces of his body tumbled past. I screamed as the force of the movement pushed me once more toward the edge of the line. But unlike before, I didn't bounce back. The outer bands of power had unraveled too much, and this time nothing caught me.

Electric blue dissolved into darkness as my body was thrown clear. I had a brief glimpse of a sky like a bruise: blue/black, septic yellow and festering, angry green. And then I was falling toward the ground hundreds of feet below.

I dropped like a stone and landed with a jolt. Despite the ward, my head hit brutally hard, thumping against dirt as rigid as concrete, causing my ribs to howl in protest. For a second, everything went white and ringing. I lay there, gasping, trying to get air back in my lungs but they didn't seem in the mood to cooperate. I finally managed to suck in some oxygen and used it to groan.

Shudders ran through me at odd intervals, mimicking the electric pulses of the line, while my stomach informed me that, yes, it was possible to be motion sick even while lying totally still on the ground. Opening my eyes sounded like a bad idea, as I wasn't particularly interested in seeing what the mages had planned for an encore. But not seeing was even worse.

I looked up and lay there transfixed, unable to do anything but stare at the sight of a blue gash spanning half the length of the sky. It spewed bursts of power like sun flares in every direction, shedding embers like transient stars. Some hit the ground, scorching the sand and setting the nearby scrub brush on fire.

It looked like we'd left Vegas behind and were somewhere in the desert. But that was the only good thing. You weren't supposed to be able to see ley lines—they didn't exist in our world, or any other. They were the metaphysical borderlines, the buffer zones between realms. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what would happen if one of them ruptured and two worlds came into direct contact.

Why didn't I think it would be good?

A raw wind pushed at me, tossing my hair around, while my stomach kept doing slow rolls. I got to my knees, gagging on the electric air, trying to scan the area for any sign that Pritkin had made it out. But my vision kept blurring. Or maybe that was the ripples, like waves, that were flowing over the sand, flooding the desert like underwater light. Everything seemed to move, but nothing was him.

"Pritkin!"

I didn't need to yell—the communication spell could pick up even a whisper—but I did it anyway. It was hard to hear anything with the wind screaming around me as the sky writhed and shredded. I stared upward until my eyes watered from the strain, and I yelled again at intervals, but there was no response.

Maybe the spell had failed, I thought desperately. Maybe that's all it was, some minor glitch. Or possibly whatever was happening to the line was throwing up interference that he couldn't break through. That had to be it, because Pritkin was virtually indestructible. And because I didn't think I could take it if it was something worse.

My tried-and-true philosophy of keeping people at a distance was taking a beating lately. It wasn't working so well with Mircea, and Pritkin had somehow bulldozed past every defense I had before I'd even noticed. I still wasn't sure how he'd done it.

He wasn't that good-looking, he had the social skills of a wet cat and the patience of a caffeinated hummingbird. In between crazy stunts and, okay, saving my life, he was just really annoying. When we'd started working together, I'd assumed it would be a question of putting up with Pritkin; then suddenly the stupid hair was making me smile, and the sporadic heroics were making my heart jump and the constant bitching had me wanting to kiss him quiet. And now I cared more than was good for me.

So, of course, he was gone.

"Pritkin!" I screamed it again, my eyes searching the widening gap above me, but there were no little dark specks that might be my partner bailing out. Had he seen me leave? Or was he still searching? No, that couldn't be it. That would be crazy and reckless and stupid.

And very Pritkin.

"— is ruptur. . now!" The garbled phrase was loud enough to make me jump and to practically crack my eardrum—and I'd never been so happy to hear anything in my life.

"I'm already out! Stop looking for me!" I yelled, but the wind blew half my words away.

"Are you. . right? Can you. . before—"

"Stop talking! Why are you still talking? Bail out, damn it!" " — the ground. Stay—"

"Shut up! Stop giving me orders and get the hell out of there!"

I didn't hear his answer, if he gave one, because the sky exploded. Blue lightning had been threading through the seething clouds, and now a huge branch arced downward, hitting a nearby hill with enough force to blow sand half a mile high. I hunched down with my arms over my head, trying to protect myself from the resulting hail of rocks and debris. And a hand descended on my shoulder.

I turned, grateful and furious, a few appropriate comments trembling on my lips—and looked into the face of a stranger. He was tall with spiky black hair and startled hazel eyes. It looked like someone bailed out early, I thought. And then my ward flared, throwing him back a dozen yards.

I watched his body arch pale and limp against the night, and then I turned and ran in the other direction. A flash of lightning hit nearby, with a thunderclap that threw me blind and rolling across the ground. I stumbled and almost fell down the side of the hill, stunned and furious. I was sick of having to dodge the people who should have been my allies while I fought my enemies and theirs. And where the hell was Pritkin?

The residual static in the air had the hair on my arms standing up as I scrambled back to my feet. I glanced back at the mage, but he didn't look too dangerous at the moment. His body lay in the weird, contorted position he'd landed in, sprawled across the dirt like a broken doll. I paused, my heart pounding wildly, flight reflex kicking in, sweat springing to the surface of my skin.

Normally, I wouldn't have wasted any sympathy—my ward doesn't flare unless there is a serious threat. That and the fact that he was with the guys who'd just tried to kill me was all the incentive I needed to get out of there. Except I couldn't. Because he'd landed facedown in a pile of loose sand deep enough to suffocate him.

The wind wrestled with my hair while I struggled with the life-or-death decision that had been dumped on me. I didn't have Pritkin's knowledge of magic. My only real defenses were my ward and my ability to shift, and neither was inexhaustible. Letting him suffocate might be the only sure way to stop him from dragging me off to a swift trial and a certain death.

But that level of ruthlessness wasn't in me.

More important, I didn't want it to become me.

I felt the chill in my chest that always came before I did something really stupid. I ran over, intending to kick him faceup and get out of there. But his damn coat weighed a ton and he wasn't exactly a lightweight. By the time I finally managed to flip him, I was panting from the effort and he still hadn't moved. "Hey." I shook him. That didn't seem to do a lot of good. "Hey, you!" I slapped his face. "Come on, don't die on me."

He didn't answer. He also didn't try to grab me again. He just lay there like a broken doll.

"I'm serious. You don't want me to have to try CPR. I killed the dummy fourteen times."

I don't know if that did it or if he'd had time to come around. He coughed up some sand and gasped in a breath, blinking grit out of his eyes. He got a clear look at me and an arm snaked out and latched onto my shoulder, jerking me down to the dirt.

My ward flared but only dimly this time. And although I could hear it sizzle against his palm, he didn't let go. So I kneed him in the groin and, when he collapsed, hit him in the back of the neck like Pritkin had taught me. He fell back against the sand with a thud.

I stared at him, awed and slightly freaked out. The work-outs that Pritkin called "a decent warm-up" and I called "evidence that you've gone crazy, oh my God, I'm having a coronary" had actually paid off. Despite the fact that that had been the point, it was a shock.

As was the fact that he'd landed facedown again.

Son of a bitch!

I finally managed to turn him over, decided I'd done my good deed for the year, picked up my skirts and ran. Psycho war mage aside, it had been almost a relief to have something to distract me from the unwelcome awareness that Pritkin was still inside the line. And that the fissure was widening and pretty soon no one was going to be able to survive in there no matter how good their shields and, oh, look, I was thinking about it after all.

There wasn't much natural cover, but some of the dunes had long shadows that, with the wind and the debris and the dim, rippling light, should have been enough to hide me. Except for the dress. I called Augustine every name in the book and invented a few new ones while my dress sobbed and cried and whined about a tear in its hem and a smear of dirt on my backside. The damn man had apparently spelled it to protest—loudly—whenever it got dirty.

It had probably seemed like a cute joke back at Dante's; here, it wasn't so funny. I might as well have a neon sign over my head glaring, HERE SHE IS. I stayed huddled where I was for a moment, watching the wind pull cayenne-colored veils off the ground and spread them across the electric blue of the sky. And every time a wave of airborne dust hit us, the dress moaned that much louder.

I dragged myself to my feet, hoping to get far enough away that the damn thing wouldn't matter. But the wind had picked up even more to the point that it felt like it would actually lift me off my feet any minute, and visibility was going south fast, with lightning sputtering overhead like a bad fluorescent bulb. And then someone tripped me.

I went down in a tangle of sobbing velvet right before a hand reached out from the dark and wrapped around my throat. My ward didn't flare at all this time, so it was down to old-fashioned, dirty fighting. I wasn't nearly as strong as the mage, and no matter what Pritkin said, strength does matter. Not to mention that war mages train in human as well as magical techniques, and I still couldn't shift.

Weird strobelike flashes started exploding across my vision. But it wasn't from the choke hold, at least not entirely, because something really not good was happening to the sky overhead. The mage's head whipped around, a hand still on my throat, and we watched in silent awe as one lightning bolt was followed by another. Within seconds the sky was filled with them, the line shedding thousands of crackling fingers of energy as its massive bands of power unraveled.

In the middle of all that tumult, my eyes somehow managed to focus on a tiny dark smudge. Someone was bailing out a dozen stories above us. "Hold on; I'm coming," Pritkin told me, sounding calm despite the pyrotechnics going on all around him. I didn't answer, but the mage saw him, too. He dragged me to my feet and put a gun to my temple.

Pritkin landed hard, letting his shields absorb the crash instead of taking the time to form them into a parachute as I'd seen him do once before. He was coming for us at a dead run, but above him, off to the east, the sky tore open like a dozen blue stars had been born all at once. And each one contained the dark form of a war mage. Either they'd seen him leave and figured out that I wasn't up there anymore, or else it was getting too hot in there even for them.

I watched their shields flow up into a dozen little chutes to carry them gently toward us on the night breeze. The maneuver would preserve whatever was left of their shields, while Pritkin's had probably been severely weakened by the ley line battle and the fall, and mine were nonexistent. We were so screwed.

"Don't be a fool, John," the mage shouted. "You can't fight these odds! You'll have to find someone else to help your ambition!"

Pritkin paused and glanced upward at the pulsing wound in the sky. "I don't know what you've been told, Liam, but my sole ambition at the moment is to survive the night."

"Then go! I'll tell them you overpowered me. Leave the pretender and I will stall them long enough for you to get away!"

I blinked at him, but Priktin didn't look surprised. "You owe me more than that," he chided. "She goes with me."

"I'm afraid not," Liam said, although he looked torn. Not torn enough to let me go, though.

"Release her and I will stay and face what passes for justice in the Circle these days."

"You would die for this one?" Liam asked incredulously.

"I have been trying to avoid it" was the dry-as-sandpaper response.

"Then go, while you still can!"

"Not without her."

"A life debt is not transferable," Liam said furiously. "I might owe you my life, but I don't owe it to her!"

Pritkin lunged forward and Liam struck out with an elbow, catching him on the chin. It snapped his head back hard enough to break his neck, had he been fully human. Thankfully, he wasn't. He rolled back to a crouched position and flung out a hand. I didn't hear an incantation, but he'd done something. Because Liam jerked like he'd been shot and hit the ground hard enough to carve a furrow in the dirt.

I scurried back out of the way as Liam looked up. Stray light played over his face, distorting the features with odd ripples and shadows. If I hadn't known better, I'd have guessed him for the one with the demon father. He threw a spell that caught Pritkin in the upper body, knocking him off his feet and using up what remained of my patience.

I hadn't wanted to carry a gun to a supposedly friendly meeting, so the only weapons I had were a couple of ghostly knives that resided in a bracelet around my wrist. Despite their appearance, they were deadly, which was why I hadn't already used them—I was supposed to be trying to keep the Circle intact, not to help destroy it. But if I had to choose between Liam and Pritkin, Liam was toast.

Pritkin had staggered back up, looking the worse for the wear. But when he saw what I was doing, he shook his head. "Don't kill him!"

Liam was also back on his feet, but he didn't attack. "She wields a dark weapon—what a surprise." The mist in his eyes grew thicker, coalescing into something unpleasant as he stared at me. "Like father, like daughter!"

"My father worked for a member of the vampire mafia," I admitted, "but that doesn't make him—"

But Liam wasn't listening. "Be grateful I don't put a bullet in your head right now," he spat. "I can guarantee that no one would question it!"

The hate in his face killed any impulse to try to win him over. I stopped extending myself, my defenses slamming firmly into place. I didn't reply, just sent him an expression that was the facial equivalent of the finger.

I was sick of the Circle treating me like roadkill because I hadn't come out of their precious initiate pool. Okay, my track record wasn't perfect, but considering the amount of training I'd received for this job, it could have been a lot worse. And maybe I'd have done a little better if they had ever made the slightest attempt to work with me.

"It would be the last thing you did," Pritkin promised.

Liam sucked in a breath. "How can you defend her?" he demanded. "Consider what she came from! A dark mage for a father, a ruined initiate for a mother, a vampire for a surrogate and, if the rumors are to be believed, another for a lover! Can't you see what's coming? Hell, man, open your eyes! She's already divided the Circle and helped to start a war, and she hasn't been on the throne a month yet! What's next?"

"She hasn't been on the throne at all," Pritkin replied as the two men circled each other. "Thanks to you and the rest of the Circle, she's never even seen it."

"And she never will," Liam said flatly. He launched himself at Pritkin and the two men lurched around the sand together.

Meanwhile, the clouds above us had formed themselves into what looked an awful lot like a tornado. A big, blue tornado spitting lightning at everything in its path. It whirled and writhed as if possessed, twisting bluish black clouds into a violent surge of pure force. Heat was coming off it—dizzying, sear-your-skin heat—while the inner column glowed with a light that permeated even the clouds. It painted the landscape with madly leaping shapes and cast light shadows on the other war mages, who had landed and were now running for us at top speed.

I ignored them, far more worried about the way the clouds were funneling down into a sharp point maybe a mile away. "Is it supposed to do that?" I asked hysterically.

Both men paused to look at me, but then the rest of the mages were on us and the fight began in earnest. Half a dozen jumped Pritkin, while I stood there and watched as the awesome power of the ley line pulsed, crested—and drained into the breach it had made into our world. Someone grabbed my arms, pulling them back brutally, but I hardly noticed. The tornado or whatever it was finished spiraling down to some goal just out of sight. And then the sky burned white.

I had time to see Pritkin turn his face away, the bones beneath his skin etched in the instant of brilliant glare. The surrounding brush and boulders and the worn leather of his beaten-up coat were all suddenly, vividly clear as the flash seared away their color. The flare was followed by a sound louder than a thunderclap, only worse; it knifed through my eardrums, filling my whole head with the vibration of it.

My eyelids squeezed shut, but a soundless white light burned through my lids as the ground rumbled beneath my feet. A hot rush of wind tangled my hair and the mage holding my arm abruptly let go. I raised my hands to help shield my eyes, but the light was already gone. After a moment, I cautiously peeked out from between my fingers, trying to get my vision to work again. But for a long moment, I couldn't see anything but a leaping field of red.

The haze eventually lifted to show me a black sky littered with stars instead of searing white or dancing blue flames. As incredible as it seemed, it was over. Except for the fierce hail of debris. The mages combined their shields to protect the area while I crouched down, hands over my head, as rubble smashed against the shield in blooms of red-orange fire.

The barrage finally stopped and the mages dropped the shield with a wave of relieved sighs. Something brushed my hand, and I looked down to see a few gray flakes trembling on the breeze before blowing away. Ash.

All around us, a soft rain of ash was falling, filling the air, covering the sand. Something over the hill was burning. Great boiling clouds hung on the horizon, eating the stars, dark at the tops but red-lit from below where flames fingered the sky.

"My God," someone said, "it hit MAGIC."