Chapter Forty-One #2
And now that I could think more clearly, I didn’t have to wonder what.
Or why adrenaline was crashing through my system, my heart was threatening to beat out of my chest, and my mind was flooded with warnings.
Because the dark magic signature pounding against my shields was a thousand times stronger than the cacophony of Tartarus, to the point that it could only be one thing.
The Black Circle had long been rumored to have an HQ of its own, somewhere in the desert, just as the Corps once did before it became a casualty of the war. But no one had ever been able to find it. Most of the Corps believed that it wasn’t a single place, but moved about whenever we got too close.
Looked like that had been wrong.
I could feel the magic thrumming through the ground under my feet, like a rocket about to take off.
Could sense the power in it, the age, as if it long predated the distant, glittering city.
Could almost hear the screams of the people who had been harvested to provide it, like a lake of damned souls.
I still couldn’t see anything, however, as what felt like a vast complex was underground.
And scent, the sense that had guided me here, could no longer help, with even my counterpart unable to smell anything through all that magic.
But she didn’t need it anymore; I didn’t need it, as the pull of that much power was strong enough to ripple the air around us, practically pointing the way.
She suddenly took off, keeping us low to the ground, almost mimicking our stance in our transformed state, as the caftan shifted from bright red/orange to the dull yellow/brown of the sand in this area.
I would have thought that a good trick, a sort of makeshift camouflage, except it wasn’t planned.
I was pretty sure that, if I’d had Sophie’s little card, it would have told me that those were the colors of increased anxiety.
Because the Corps had spent considerable effort through the years trying to find the Black Circle’s base, yet had always come up empty. How could they have failed when it was this obvious? Or did it just seem so thanks to my counterpart’s senses?
I didn’t think so. She didn’t seem to have magical ability, at least not in the conventional sense, any more than the average Were. So in this one way, my senses were probably better than hers.
Although I hardly needed them with a signature this strong.
Even a norm would have felt uneasy out here, a creeping sensation of wrongness up her spine, a flood of gooseflesh down her arms, a tendency to jerk and stumble and trip at every sound.
And to anyone with even a modicum of magical ability, it was a klaxon sounding in the stillness, blaring out a single word: Run.
Yet there was no attempt to mask the signature that I could detect, or even to damp it down. That would have been reckless at any time, but in a war, it was utterly insane. Either the Black Circle had collectively lost their minds, or else we had to be...
Right on top of them.
The thought finally managed to tear through my confusion and scattered thoughts. No, we couldn’t be here. No, we had to go!
I tried to convey this information, tried hard, but my counterpart wasn’t listening. She was on the hunt and zeroing in on her prey. And she apparently thought herself invincible even though we were exhausted, panting with every step, and headed toward a nightmare.
“Cut it out!” I said through gritted teeth, trying my best to turn us around. And my best made a difference, because her footsteps faltered and we staggered slightly. Only to push off a rock face and keep going, with barely a lost step.
Her thoughts took over mine for a second, with flashes of that vision she’d shown me back at Dante’s, of a skewed glimpse of the stars shining down into the canyon and the blood and carnage that had followed.
Of how she’d bayed over her enemy’s body while bathed in a shaft of moonlight, on top of a mountain of the corpses of his one-time friends. Of how she would do it again—
“No, you won’t!” I said. “You’ll be killed and take me with you!”
But she still didn’t turn around. So I grabbed hold of one of the rocky protuberances in this area and held on, digging into the crumbling stone deep enough to leave impressions if anyone else were to pass this way. Which they wouldn’t, because people who came here didn’t leave!
Stop, she told me, with the air of a mother correcting a misbehaving toddler.
“You stop!” I snarled and tried a compulsion spell, which didn’t work as it was on myself.
It did make us both seriously dizzy, however, as if I wasn’t already, and got me a paw bat to the head. Stop!
“Listen to me,” I said desperately, digging my fingers in deeper, even as she dragged us along the rock, leaving long gouges in the stone. “You think you can handle this, but you can’t handle this!”
Find him; kill him. Mages don’t matter, she explained—not at all.
“They’ll matter when they’re melting our face off, and what are you doing?”
That last was because she had jerked us free of the stone and was running toward a semicircle of high, jutting rocks in a valley below, darker than the surrounding sand and far bigger than the smaller ones up here.
They resembled nothing so much as the grasping fingers of some subterranean monster trying to claw its way free.
Which was not a great thought to have when my own efforts were yielding exactly fuck all!
Until I threw us into a ditch and my head slammed into a rock, hard enough to rattle us.
“Listen to me,” I told her, low and urgent, before she could recover. “That thing you felt back there, that almost stopped us in our tracks? That was a ward. Not the kind meant to hurt but to warn. They know we’re here—”
Good.
“No, it is not good! We’re going to die, they’re going to skin us and use our pelt to create a monster to savage our friends, our family, our clan. Do you get it? You have to stop.”
He will do worse, was the only answer I received back, which made no sense!
Bleddyn was a peaked-in-high-school, out-of-shape, Were version of a man-child that his own father hadn’t trusted.
He wasn’t a threat, even if the ghost of some ancient Were had possessed him, or whatever the hell was going on.
“It still has to work through him,” I reminded her, “and he’s an idiot! He’s not the problem; the Black Circle is the problem.”
But she didn’t get it. And I couldn’t control her and had no way even to call this in. Because my phone was back in the Pythia’s goddamned kitchen!
So I summoned all my energy and threw us to the side again, trying to find another rock, this time to knock us out and hope I would be the one to return to consciousness first. But she could read my thoughts, and she didn’t like that idea. She didn’t like that at all.
Which was how I ended up wrestling with myself in the dirt like a madwoman.
I probably looked like one, too, with my wild hair, filthy, torn caftan, and grunted curse words because she wasn’t.
.. letting... go. Instead, she was trying to tell me something, but this time, I was the one not listening, because my brain was filled with, “We have to go, we have go, we have to go right now!” And then I got an idea and tried to Change, but she wouldn’t let me, batting back my wolf as if it was a misbehaving cub and making both of us furious!
This was my body! My wolf! And I’d damned well Change when I wanted to!
Only I guessed I wouldn’t, because I didn’t go hairy, no matter how hard I tried.
But my wolf was awake now and just as pissed as I was, and jumped her counterpart in the spirit realm.
Allowing me to stagger back to my feet and scramble up the side of the cliff we were halfway down, trying to remember the direction of the highway.
And wondering why there were suddenly boots in my face—
Shit.