Chapter 9
To work the spell, Nigel was obliged to drain absolutely every ounce of magical juice from those three dark drops. But there was plenty of magical juice to be drained. While not the classiest of Dire Matter brands, it was nearly a century old, and had fermented nicely.
Nigel used the three drops to create anchor points on the ground around the van, and proceeded to trace sigils between each point, drawing invisible lines of power through the air until he’d generated a sort of shimmering cage of anti-glitter.
When he was quite certain it was secure, every last strand tightened and double-knotted, he whispered the final words of power in a dead and damned language.
Then he climbed into the front seat, slammed the door shut, and reached for his seatbelt. “Are you buckled in, Miss Talbot?”
Luna, sitting in the passenger seat with Miss Eugenia’s bridal bouquet in her lap, grunted, her gaze focused straight ahead.
“You might want to hold onto something,” he said.
Though she still wouldn’t look at him, she put out one hand, bracing against the dashboard.
And a good thing too. Because the instant the automagic motor started up, and the vehicle kicked into motion, the spell activated.
There was a rumble and a bump and a very brief rush, like a plunge down a short but extraordinarily powerful waterfall.
Layers of both the physical and unphysical worlds peeled back in sparks of radiant energy, and the van slipped out of their own narrow form of existence into unspace.
A yelp burst from Luna’s lips, followed by a stream of prayers to the Green Mother, spoken in such a rush, Nigel could only pick up a word here and there. Words like, “Help!” and “Deliverance!” and “Mercy!” spoken with particular emphasis.
“It’s all right, Miss Talbot,” he said as the van, following that initial thump and bump, rumbled smoothly forward. “You don’t need to brace yourself anymore. It should be easy going from here.”
He proceeded to steer the vehicle out of the parking garage. Because the parking garage was, in fact, still visible all around them, along with all the automagic mobiles in their delineated spots. Only now everything was filmed-over in a hazy pinkishness, dotted with motes of anti-glitter.
Nigel pulled out into traffic. Perfectly still traffic, on a street that was, like the garage, similarly coated in a pinkish aura.
He wove in and out among stationary vehicles, the van putt-putting along at no more than 30 miles an hour.
But to judge by the rigid-jawed, pale-cheeked expression on Luna’s face, one would think he was driving a wild and reckless grand prix, with her as his prisoner in the passenger seat.
She gripped Miss Eugenia’s bouquet with one hand, her other hand braced on the dashboard, knuckles white. She was apparently still praying.
“There’s really no need for alarm, Miss Talbot,” Nigel said. “I am a perfectly capable driver.”
She shot him a withering glare, just on the verge of venomous. “It’s not the driving that concerns me, Mr. Grimm.”
Nigel bristled. “My spellwork is sound,” he said cooly, keeping his eyes on the shimmering road ahead. “You needn’t concern yourself on that score either.”
“If that’s the case, why are you driving along at this creeping pace? You might be mistaken for my Extremely Great Aunt Amelia!”
The bristling intensified. Nigel set his chin, “From everything I’ve heard about your extremely great aunt, that sounds like a compliment.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure about that!”
Luna gasped as Nigel pulled around a lorry, which was frozen in the act of bumping one of its huge wheels on the curb.
An oncoming vehicle appeared in the opposite lane, and she braced for impact.
But Nigel smoothly continued at the same sedate pace, and the oncoming car never moved an inch.
He completed the pass without haste and pulled back into his own lane.
Luna let out a breath. Then she finally pushed back from the dashboard, settled into her seat, and allowed the belt strap to tighten across her breast. “Extremely Great Aunt Amelia,” she said, as though to distract herself from the horrors around her, “drove an ancient old Fordyce Mobile. On the day she and the other aunties came to pick me up from the Greater Snoring station, it took us nearly four hours to drive the five miles back to Tealeaf Cottage.”
“Proving your extremely great aunt exercised caution and consideration for her passengers.”
“No,” Luna growled. “She was just blind as a bat!”
Nigel popped on the blinker before taking a turn, though there was no one else navigating the unspace with them. “And were you yourself more daring in your motoring ventures along the Crimble Mountain roads?”
She snorted. “I never learned to drive. None of us dared touch Extremely Great Aunt Amelia’s machine. After she passed, we turned it into a planter for tea bushes and stuck to the old horse and cart.”
“Well,” Nigel said, “if we had access to a horse and cart, I would gladly turn over the reins.”
“A horse and cart would get us there faster than this!”
“And why are you so concerned about speed, Miss Talbot?”
“Because you froze time, Mr. Grimm!” She uttered a little yelp as he drove up onto the sidewalk to navigate around a two-way jam, then yelped again when he came down off the curb back onto the road. “Surely that’s not the sort of thing one ought to maintain for any prolonged period!”
Nigel glanced her way, one eyebrow tilted. “I haven’t frozen anything.”
“You haven’t?”
“Of course not. No one can freeze time. Llewellyn Snickerweft from Oskyae once claimed to have done so, but his methods were debunked by Angus Hexworth in the eighteenth century, and—”
“Then why is everyone frozen? Like that fellow!” Luna pointed out a man walking his dog along the sidewalk. The dog was caught in the act of lifting his leg beside the streetlamp, the emitting stream suspended in midair. “Looks pretty frozen to me!”
“Appearances aren’t everything, Miss Talbot.”
He felt her gaze fix upon him with such lance-like intensity, it might pierce his skull. “Mr. Grimm,” she said in a voice that might have come straight from the icebox, “if you take that condescending tone with me one more time, I’m going to feed you these peonies.”
Nigel chuckled. But, upon a second glance at his companion’s steely face and the way she brandished that bouquet, he hastily swallowed back all impulses of mirth and straightened his own features into rather more serious lines.
“Time is not frozen,” he said and cleared his throat.
“It is continuing on at its ordinary pace without interference. We have simply . . . stepped outside of it ourselves.”
“What?”
It wasn’t easy, condensing such a complicated concept into layman’s terms, without the use of certain arcane verbiage and a basic understanding in Dire metaphysics.
Nigel took a stab at it, nonetheless. “Picture that our reality is like a crystal ball,” he said, “swathed in bubble wrap and packaged up in a wooden crate.”
Luna blinked. “All right,” she said slowly. “Pictured.”
“We are in, erm, the bubble wrap. And the crystal ball of time-bound reality you see before you, through the pink haze.”
Turning her head, Luna stared through the windshield once more. “So . . .” She worried her lower lip before forcing herself to continue. “So I’m not in my own reality?”
“Well . . .”
“Well what? You just said we’re in the bubble wrap!”
“Yes, but to be totally outside of our reality, you’d have to be beyond the wooden crate as well. We’re still safe and snug within our own reality. We’re merely outside of time. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . on the other side of the wooden crate . . .” Luna swallowed hard. “That would be the Dire Dimensions?”
Nigel shrugged. “For the purposes of this analogy, sure.”
“Oh, sweet Green Mother preserve us!”
With this exclamation, Luna pressed a hand to her breast and fell back into another series of prayers, uttered with even more pious desperation than before.
Nigel winced. Apparently, his attempts to allay her fears had gone astray somewhere.
But really, what did she want him to say? It wasn’t as though they were—
“Watch out, Mr. Grimm!”
Nigel whipped his gaze forward and slammed on the brakes.
Though there really wasn’t much slamming required, considering the pace they were making.
They came to a stop just at a crosswalk, where a woman strode boldly forth with her cat on a leash.
Her cat? Yes, that was a cat, most certainly.
Whiskers and question-mark tail and everything.
And they were taking up this whole side of the crosswalk, while a prune-faced nanny with a pram and a tugging toddler on the end of her arm took up the other.
“It would seem this is as far as we can go by motor,” Nigel said with a sigh.
There wasn’t room to drive up on the sidewalk here.
“I can see the dome of Saint Agatha’s. We aren’t far and should be able to .
. .” His voice trailed away as he turned to his companion and found that she was still grasping her breast with one hand, panting hard and struggling to make little gulping breaths. “Miss Talbot, are you quite all right?”
“No!” she squeaked, turning her furious gaze his way. “I’m ruddy well not all right! Not by any definition of all rightness am I all right!”
Nigel’s brow puckered. On impulse, he reached out a reassuring hand, but stopped short of touching her.
They had both been very careful not to touch each other over the last four weeks.
Not even the simplest, most innocent brush of fingers.
Whether this was purposeful on her part or not, Nigel couldn’t say.
But he had been aware of it, nonetheless.