FORTY
The witch’s young apprentice opened the door with her finger over her mouth to ensure Gellar, with Condorr and Bellus, stepped silently into the room. Gellar had been in enough battles to know the difference between a room going quiet and a room holding its breath.
This was the latter.
Gellar leaned against the far wall with his arms folded, watching the Sleep Wizard work.
Bellus stood beside him, his spectacles catching the low candlelight, with notepad and quill at the ready. Condorr remained a half-step back, with his palm out, reading the magick in the air.
The three witches moved in a slow circle along the room’s edges, their chanting a steady low hum beneath the incense and flickering candle flame.
Angela Duboise lay at the center of the Dream Circle, asleep.
She looked so small and fragile lying there.
That was the thing that always caught Gellar off-guard—she seemed so entirely ordinary. A mortal woman from the mortal realm, breathing slowly on a floating mattress, surrounded by the Dream Circle’s web made of chalk and feathers.
Nothing to fear.
Except his most disciplined captain, a man who had spent centuries mastering his magick that could level a mortal realm’s city block, had broken the Accords for her without flinching.
As Commander of the Vanguard, leader of the Sworn Exarchs, Gellar could not forget it either. But first he needed to see how this played out as there was a lot riding on this dreamscape. The one question he needed answered most: was Angela Duboise the new power?
The Sleep Wizard’s hands moved in careful passes above her sleeping form, his voice low and steady. “Can you hear me, Angela?”
No response.
“Angela, it’s me, Dremulus. Can you hear me?”
Still nothing. The body on the mattress breathed, but Angela Duboise frowned. Her jaw became slightly slack, but her eyes moved fast beneath closed lids in the rapid-fire way that showed she was deep in the dream state.
“Angela?” The wizard’s voice wasn’t reaching her.
It was enough for Bellus to raise a concerned eyebrow at Gellar between scribbling in his notebook.
“What’s wrong?” Gellar demanded, mindful of keeping his voice low.
“She’s with someone else,” the Sleep Wizard replied with an edge of worry beneath the professional calm. “She is not listening to me.”
“Has this happened before?” Bellus’s quill hovered over the half-written page of his notebook.
“No.” The Sleep Wizard’s long white hair and beard shifted as he shook his head. “Never.”
Condorr stepped closer, ready and willing to jump in at any moment.
Gellar had been surprised that Zarek had recommended Condorr be present because he’d shared a connection with Angela over chocolate.
Even though Gellar saw Zarek battle daily with the demon that contained his fire, he was a captain who saw people’s strengths for the bigger picture, a rare gift for someone so powerful.
One the Commander did not want to lose over laws broken because of this mortal woman.
“Do we call Zarek?” Condorr asked.
“No,” Gellar commanded. “We sent Zarek into the human realm to not interfere with this operation. We can’t risk the Claiming affecting this. Let’s play this out.”
Not for politics—though the threat of the Continuum Council, and Zarek’s actions against the Accords, were a wound that needed closing before it became fatal.
All of that was true. But underneath the strategy, and all the careful calculations Gellar had been making since the moment Zarek had walked into the dining hall holding that woman’s hand like she was already his, Gellar needed to know what she was.
For centuries, Gellar had fought against Katarra. Watching too many of his brothers and sisters fall, only for the Black Cloaks’ numbers to simply return the next night while the Vanguard held the line with fewer soldiers each passing decade.
When the Seers had spoken of a new power, it gave him hope that they finally had something that would shift the weight of this war. So he needed to know what power this mortal woman, Angela Duboise, had.
“Keep going. Finish it,” he ordered.
The wizard nodded tightly and returned to his work as the witches kept casting around the circle.
Gellar nodded at Bellus and Condorr to stand down, but they were the kind of warriors who never truly stood down.
Angela Duboise’s fingers tightened around the medallion that hung from her neck, as a frown formed between her brows. Her breathing changed, becoming shallower as if the surrounding air had turned hostile. It was similar to the way they’d trained their Vanguard to face their fears in a battle.
But then her back arched as if something was about to snap her body in half. And then she became still, as if frozen.
He’d seen possessions before, but not like this.
“She’s stopped breathing.” Condorr held his palm out to read the magick. “The air in the room is doing something wrong.”
There was a subtle pressure change, as if the room had inhaled and kept inhaling, so much so the candle flames were pointing toward the center of the dreamcatcher’s circle like a compass needle finding north.
The hair on his arms stood on end.
The wizard paused, his face full of worry.
“Keep going,” Gellar ordered. Magick like this had to come from somewhere.
Bellus made a sound as a crack splintered across his spectacles, like ice breaking on a frozen lake in spring. The historian became pale as he carefully removed them, only for the glass to shatter like sparkly dust.
Then came the eerie crack of a whip snapping in the air. It came from the wall of windows, where the glass fractured into a furious network of webs that grew like skeletal fingers stretching for an escape.
“I think,” Bellus said carefully, “we should wake her up.”
Condorr nodded beside him, hands on his blades, ready to draw.
“Don’t touch her. We have to let this play out.” Gellar was aware of the risk. But they had been fighting blind for centuries, that whatever was building in the center of the Dream Circle, was the closest thing they’d had to an answer.
This was for the good of the realm, and all those other realms that had been destroyed.
For the Vanguard, the Sworn Exarchs, and the fallen ancestors who had not been allowed to rest. This was for his captain, who had broken something irreversible for this woman.
For all of them, as their commander, he deserved to know: What are you?
The pressure grew.
The spiderweb of cracks spread to the brick wall, creating a sound like distant artillery.
The witches were struggling now with their casting, their movements tighter, faster, the smoke from their incense gone.
The herbs and flowers they held, along with every loose item, was sucked toward the center to form a spinning circle of debris that grew beneath the floating mattress.
The candles flared like flamethrowers, only to lean toward the center, as if being sucked into that growing tornado of debris, as the hum of the witches’ voices rose in pitch.
Angela’s back hit the mattress as if slapping against wood.
And then the words came.
Not from Angela.
It was something else that used her voice, filled with an authority to charge two words that filled their world like an explosion: “KATARRA—DIE.”
The glass windows detonated outward.
Every candle extinguished at once, and in the darkness that killed the sunshine came the wind.
It came from that tiny spinning circle of debris forming under the dream mattress, expanding so hard and fast to tear into the room like a monstrous tornado of dark air and wind. It hit Gellar like a wall.
On instinct, he activated his shield, planted his feet, and felt the stone floor tremble beneath him.
Around him, the world came apart. The witches were lifted and carried away.
The wizard was swept back against the far wall, which broke as if it were made of sticks and was gone.
The windows—already fractured—were gone entirely, frames and all, as more stone crumbled along their edges and disintegrated from the force of the wind.
Condorr had one arm locked around Bellus, taking shelter behind the largest fallen section of wall.
Gellar pressed himself flat behind a stone pillar and held for cover. His magick pushed outward against the wind, in the same way Condorr’s strength was his power, keeping that block of wall in place to shield them.
It made no difference.
Gellar’s own refined and formidable magick pressed against that wind, but it was simply not enough against this different kind of power. It was as if he’d entered a conversation where he didn’t speak their language with a list of weaponry beyond this realm’s capabilities.
If this magick can do this to us…?
At the eye of the storm, Angela lay in the shredded remains of the Dream Circle.
The chalk and feathers were gone, but the mattress floated in perfect stillness where she lay.
Except her back was arched like a bow, with one hand locked in a white-knuckled grip around her medallion, her face tilted toward a ceiling that was cracking above her.
She was screaming, a raw and ancient sound that made his scalp prickle and skin crawl.
Gellar pressed against the fallen pillar as the cold settled into his bones. It had nothing to do with the wind but everything to do with her and that scream.
“What have we awakened?”