Chapter 16 #2
“The spell I have in mind requires a channeler.” He glanced up at her while continuing his rummaging.
“Something to direct the sorcerous energy so that it only impacts the target intended. Using a Green Magic channel should help prevent the magic of the Heart Tree from being harmed.” In quick succession, he pulled out and discarded a series of hand rakes, weed pullers, clippers, shears, and even a spray bottle.
At last, he settled on an old trowel, a rusty thing, but sturdy.
Luna herself had used it on numerous occasions during her forays into Garden.
Mr. Grimm began to pass his hands over it.
Luna felt the energy-transference taking place and cast her gaze about, curious to know from where he was sourcing.
She couldn’t see any obvious candidates.
It was possible he used his own lifeforce, though she vividly remembered how disastrously that had turned out the last time.
He was much more in control now, however.
So precise, so concentrated. And so stupidly handsome.
Ugh. Why did he have to look like that while performing sorcery of all things?
With that suit jacket hanging open, revealing his torso like he was the dashing hero right off the cover of one of Auntie Arabella’s trashy novels.
Granted, those fellows tended to be a good three times larger than Mr. Grimm, but .
. . if Luna was honest, she was never drawn to all that bulk.
She could appreciate it, sure, but that didn’t mean it moved her, as such.
Whereas everything Mr. Grimm had going on just worked, somehow.
From that floppy lock of hair, to that severe brow, to the hard line of his jaw, his neck, all the way down his exposed sternum to where . . .
She grimaced.
. . . to where that ugly black heptagram tattoo was emblazoned.
A sudden flare of strange colors erupted in Luna’s vision.
She couldn’t name any of them, though some she found vaguely familiar.
She’d glimpsed colors like those on the night she climbed the wall at Bruxley Hall, and Mr. Grimm had blown open the front gate.
These were colors drawn from the Dire Dimensions.
Mr. Grimm held the trowel aloft. It burned, brilliant and strange, like some sort of arcane implement of ancient days.
Presumably sorcerers of yore would work spells like that on their daggers and swords.
It was a bit incongruous used on a gardening trowel, but the old instrument seemed to take the spell well enough.
“Stand back, Miss Talbot,” Mr. Grimm said, looking up at her from those black-gleaming eyes of his.
Luna drew a sharp breath and drew away quickly, horrified. He seemed taller. Not quite the seven-foot figure of whorling dark sorcery she’d glimpsed before, but definitely something rather closer to that guise than usual.
He turned from her. His jacket billowed out from his naked torso in a profound wind of sorcerous energy, harvested from Realms Beyond.
The snow continued to come down so hard, it was almost blinding, but the light from that trowel and the pulsing glow of anti-glitter surrounding Mr. Grimm made him impossible to miss.
He approached the tree, stood before it, muttering words in a strange, fell tongue.
Then he plunged the trowel into the trunk, driving it deep. Far deeper than that rusty old metal should have penetrated into hardwood. But he made it look easy.
Luna caught her breath. Through her mind there appeared a vision she’d glimpsed months ago, in a tea mug.
A vision she’d thought about many times since then, though she usually focused on one aspect in particular—the sight of Mr. Grimm caught in an amorous embrace with that beautiful, nightgown-clad woman.
It was an image which haunted her at times more than she liked to admit.
But there was more.
There was the moment when he drove a gardening trowel up under that woman’s ribcage.
A single, sharp, violent motion.
Not at all unlike what she just saw him do to that tree.
Luna pressed both hands to her pounding heart.
How many times in the intervening months had she tried to convince herself that vision was a mistake?
Her Sight wasn’t particularly strong, usually limited to small fortunes in near futures.
Anything on a grand scale was more likely to be a misconstrued thaumatic resonance, picked up from some alternate universe, not meant for this world, this timeline, this understanding.
But seeing Mr. Grimm like this—tall and deadly, brimming with such power—Luna had to wonder: was that future drawing near?
Was it coming for him, stalking him like a vicious tiger in the night?
Was he destined to meet that redheaded beauty and .
. . and love her? For surely he could not kiss her like that without real passion.
All this flashed through Luna’s mind in the instant that trowel plunged into the tree trunk. A complicated sort of instant, but that happened sometimes when one is a scryer.
The next instant, however, was far less complicated.
It involved a sudden, powerful surge of magic, rippling out from that place where the trowel entered the trunk.
A burst that flowed from the Heart Tree in a ripple of multi-colored energy and anti-glitter, which caught Mr. Grimm up in its force and sent him flying.