Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Kit
My butt was frozen. I was the most powerful mythic in the world—assuming I had more total skill points than Kade—but I still couldn’t prevent my gluteus from turning into blue ice. Maybe I could use pyromagery to roast my own rump, so to speak.
That was probably a bad idea.
Zak, sitting across from me with his druidic derriere parked on the snowpack, seemed unfazed by our subzero seating arrangement. Apparently having clear access to the stars was worth freezing your tail off.
He cracked his eyes open. “What are you doing?”
“I need you to be honest with me,” I said. “Has your butt lost all feeling?”
He scowled. “Focus.”
“How am I supposed to concentrate when my caboose could liquefy nitrogen?”
Lienna walked between me and Zak, her grimoire in her hand. “Focusing through physical discomfort is good practice.”
“Seriously? Why does no one care if I get frostbitten cheeks?”
“I have a salve for that,” Zak said, closing his eyes again. “It burns like hell for several hours. I’ll get it for you when we’re done.”
“Hey, look at that—the feeling is coming back.”
“Good. Now focus.”
As I grimaced, Lienna reappeared in my peripheral vision.
She crouched to check something on the ground, then consulted her grimoire, which had a reading light clipped to it.
The only other illumination came from a battery-powered lantern sitting beside Zak, its harsh white light glittering across the snow.
Lienna rose again. Our eyes caught, and she offered a smile halfway between encouragement and mischief.
Grumbling, I forced my eyelids down and focused. The background thrum of the earth’s energy filled my mind. I’d come to realize over the past several hours that it was more of a feeling than a sound, and once I understood how to “listen” to that feeling, it became a symphony of information.
The frigid ground hummed with a quiet lassitude made up of a thousand individual notes I couldn’t begin to separate—everything from the dormant grasses of the meadow to the hibernating insects in the soil to the small rodents tunneling beneath the snow.
Beyond the meadow was a deep, sedate vibration from the endless forests that blanketed the mountain slopes, and a wild, rushing energy at the edge of my senses was, as Zak had informed me, the powerful Fraser River crashing through the canyon toward the lower mainland.
Feeling the vitality of life all around me was breathtaking and humbling. Most powerful mythic alive or not, I was just one inconsequential meat sack among billions of organisms doing their own thing, unaware of me or magic or mythics or power struggles.
“Ready?” Zak asked.
I kept my eyes shut. “Yeah.”
The bright blaze of energy that surrounded Zak burst outward, sweeping across me and the meadow. The thrum of all that life shifted, changing in pitch until it vibrated in tune with me.
I shivered, but not from the cold. All the vivacious effusion in this meadow and beyond was suddenly Kit-attuned. The instant I pulled on the energy, it rushed toward me like I was a supercharged magnet. Power engulfed me, lighting up my insides.
My mind sharpened, my senses hyperaware of everything around me—Zak’s aura, Lienna’s presence, the flow of power crisscrossing the ground beneath me in an enigmatic web.
I could feel the slow pull of cold air in and out of my lungs, the measured pulse of the blood in my veins, and the press of my butt against the hard ground.
My poor, cold butt.
“Lienna,” Zak said, “are you ready to begin?”
“Yes.”
I sensed Zak rising and moving away.
“Okay, Kit,” Lienna murmured.
I opened my eyes and, without standing, shifted to face the opposite direction. Spread before me was a fifteen-foot-diameter circle of perfectly smooth ice. The NHL’s best ice guru couldn’t make ice this flawless.
On it, Lienna had drawn an intricate Arcana array with three interlaced circles in a row. I was positioned within one circle, the astrolabe was in the center, and inside the third sat a tiny wooden cube.
“Okay,” she said with an uncharacteristic note of nervousness as she peered up at the star-dusted night sky. “Everything is ready. I think.”
Standing at the edge of the spell with his lantern dangling from one hand, Zak crossed his arms. “You think?”
“It’s ready,” she repeated with more confidence.
Footsteps crunched on the snow. Saber stopped beside Zak, looking positively cozy in a winter coat, toque, and mittens. Ríkr was perched on her shoulder in ferret form.
Saber took in the elaborate array. “Is it safe to be this close?”
“Yeah, of course,” Lienna said, a little breathless. “This should be very straightforward.”
An ominous whoosh of déjà vu rushed over me. Where had I heard those words before? Ah yes. A certain former assassin had uttered them shortly before convincing me to leap off an overpass onto a speeding train.
Lienna cleared her throat. “I’ll read the first part of the incantation, then you do your thing, Kit. After that, I’ll read the rest and … it works or it doesn’t.”
“Got it,” I told her, projecting more confidence than I felt. I’d seen her whip up an abjuration array in the middle of a life-or-death battle, so seeing her uncharacteristic case of the jitters made me antsy.
With another little cough, she straightened her shoulders and began to read in Latin.
“Almis si quis inest stellis perclara potestas,
disce legens tabulam, lectaque vim tribuat.
Carpere enim tibi si vis illam ac solus habere,
carpe; potes nec non communicare aliis.”
Pausing, she gave me a nod.
My turn.
I looked down at the maze of lines that connected the circle I occupied to the astrolabe. Power was already flowing through me. In my mind’s eye, I poured it into the array. Silver light blazed from every etching in the ice, just as bright as the spell Kade had used to copy my magic.
Gripping her notebook, Lienna chanted, “Sub gratia stellarum dona hanc potestatem communicandam.”
Light swept into the tiny wooden cube in the third circle, making it glow like a radioactive die. As the final ancient words fell from her lips, the array shuddered, the light flickered out, and steam rose from the frozen engravings.
As I released the power rushing through my body and forced my chilled limbs to unfold, my hyperawareness subsided, leaving me feeling momentarily sluggish—like the world around me was moving too fast and I couldn’t keep up.
Lienna rushed forward to scoop the wooden block off the ice.
“It worked!” She held it up, grinning broadly. “Look!”
I got to my feet, sensation creeping back into my limbs, and stepped closer to peer at the little artifact in her hand.
On its formerly blank face, glowing like a megawatt lightbulb, was a rune that bore a striking resemblance to the sunburst on the forehead of the archmythic illustration I’d carried around for months.
Zak and Saber joined us, both studying the wooden block with interest.
“Now,” Lienna said, “I just need to add it to my Rubik’s cube and—”
A trilling ringtone interrupted her. The smile fell off her face, and an irrepressible sense of doom ignited in the vicinity of my diaphragm.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, glanced at the screen—a private number—and hit the speakerphone button. “Who’s this?”
“Darius.” His flat tone morphed that feeling of doom into sharp urgency. “We miscalculated, Kit.”
I locked eyes with Lienna to steady myself for whatever he said next. “What happened?”
“The rescue operation did not go according to plan. None of my guildeds made it back. Only the Pandora Knights escaped with some of the prisoners, and they revealed that our estimate of one hundred SI agents in the city was wrong. The reality is likely closer to one thousand.”
My hand clenched around the phone. Lienna stifled a gasp, and beside her, Saber’s expression went disconcertingly blank.
A thousand trained, ruthless SI agents. Well, shit. Bodil and the Sha’ir had gone up against a Viking army, sure. But they’d lost. Bodil died.
“Your team,” I said. “What happened? Are they alive?”
“We don’t know,” Darius answered. “Griva also arrived earlier than we expected. He’s already in Vancouver.”
Zak swore under his breath.
“What about Kade?” I asked. “Any sign of his slimy skull?”
“Two lookouts at YVR reported a possible sighting of him a couple of hours ago. They’re now missing, as is Kade.”
That was confirmation enough for me.
Darius paused, his silence stretching before he finally spoke.
“Everyone is in agreement: we cannot leave prisoners in the SI’s hands any longer or allow the SI to solidify their control over the city.
Aurelia, Vancouver’s other guilds, and my guild officers will attack tonight, before Griva can mobilize the entire SI force. ”
My heart rate kicked up another notch. “What about the documents?”
“They’re the key to exposing the Consilium. Getting them out of Vancouver is critical to our objective.”
When he said nothing more, an odd feeling stole over me. “But you’re not going to take the documents and run, are you?”
“No.”
Darius was going to fight alongside Blythe and his guild. Twenty years ago, he’d sacrificed everything for the greater good. This time, he was making the selfish choice. He was choosing the people he loved.
“We’ll have plenty of time to show off those documents and tear down the Consilium after we save our friends and annihilate Griva and Kade,” I said, keeping my eyes on Lienna’s. “We’ll leave here right away.”
“How long will it take you to get back to the city?”
“Two hours.”
“An hour and forty,” Saber said, stepping between me and Zak. “If you let me drive.”
Zak’s gaze snapped to her, a question in his eyes.
“We’ll be waiting,” Darius said.
The call ended, and I lowered my phone to my side, overwhelmed by the weight of what was coming.
“You want to fight?” Zak asked Saber quietly.
Her expression hardened. “Yes. You were right. We need to defend our home—and our family.”
“Then we should grab a few extra things.” He handed me the lantern. “We’ll meet you at your vehicle in a few minutes.”
The two druids took off toward the workshop together, probably to load up on potions and weapons.
Lienna closed her hand around mine. I pulled her into my arms and crushed her to me, the lantern bouncing against her back. She pressed her face into my chest, holding on just as tightly.
A thousand SI agents, Griva, and Kade. It wasn’t a fight that anyone, even an archmythic, could win. With every guild and every agent from the Vancouver precinct backing me up, it still wasn’t a fight we could win.
But we had to try.
I loosened my arms, and Lienna lifted her head to meet my eyes. The glow of the wooden block in her hand shone through her fingers.
“You ready for this?” she whispered.
I tuned my senses in to the energy all around me—power waiting to be tapped and the prickle of warmth returning to my keister. “I’m ready to make Kade and Griva rue the day they heard the name Kit Morris.”