I put my hand out to touch theirs and closed my eyes.
“I represent the west,” Ex said, and I felt a surge come from his hand. Not heat, but something like it. His living force was as familiar to me now as a favorite book, and I welcomed the sensation.
“I represent the east,” Chogyi Jake said, and an answering surge came from him, cooler and gentler, but strong and undeniable.
I gathered my own qi, drawing it up from the base of my spine, through my heart and lungs and throat, and out along my own arm as I spoke. “I represent the south,” I said. My will mingled with theirs, the three different forces joining to become something larger. Stronger. I felt the twine begin to tug against us like a puppy ready to go for a walk, then lose its focus. One way and then another.
“I represent the north,” the Black Sun said with my voice, “and I will not be denied.”
If the surges of will before had been like the pressure of water coming out from a faucet, she was the fire hose. I gasped as the force of her broke against us. I felt Ex pulling back for a moment, stunned by the onslaught, but he rallied, steadied himself. I glanced at him, and his upper lip was beaded with sweat. He began to chant softly in Latin. Chogyi Jake picked up the rhythm after a couple rounds, and then the Black Sun and I, collaborating on the syllables, chanted with them. I could feel the twine even though it was between Chogyi Jake’s fingers. I closed my eyes and it began to shift, tugging and spinning. Carla’s face came to me like I was dreaming. I saw the distress in the corners of her eyes and the lines of her mouth. She’d been crying, but I didn’t know why.
Yes, I thought. Her.
The pressure of our combined will pushed down, and something pushed back. We slid across it, string and hair and silver becoming only themselves again for a moment. Ex’s voice, rough with effort, slipped into my ears, and I realized I hadn’t been hearing him. Or anything. I bore down again, riding my rider as we brought the spell back into focus. Carla came to me again. A house. Green tile in the kitchen. A little porch out the front window with a swing on it. The smell of maple syrup and bacon. Breakfast for lunch. The string twitched, the wards pushing us away again.
No, I thought. Hold on.
The wards slid against us, drawing the silver away, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, they were gone. Carla was before me as clearly as if we were both in the same room. She had a scrape on her right hand, just below the knuckles. There were three pancakes on the plate in front of her. Someone was in the seat beside her, but I couldn’t see who. They were nothing more firm than a presence, a ghost. I felt the weight of the river nearby, the moving water like a dead zone in my sight.
“Water,” I said.
“Water Street,” Chogyi Jake murmured from a long, long way away.
“South,” Ex growled. “She’s on South Water Street.”
I was in the room with her, and I was also outside, looking in. There two more people there I couldn’t see. Walking blind spots. The house was white with blue-painted houses to either side. A tree grew, not in the yard, but in the median between yard and street. There was a garage in back. I could find it.
“Carla,” I said. She looked up, confused, and I was back in Jay’s kitchen. The twine was whirring in a circle so fast it looked like a disk. Tiny drops of Chogyi Jake’s blood spattered the map, and I saw that the largest of them had pooled on Water Street.
Chogyi Jake stopped the spinning weight. He looked pleased, I thought, but a little tired. I felt like I’d run a half marathon in a snowsuit.
“Are you all right?” Jay asked. His voice sounded small. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and grinned.
“Perfect,” I said. “Never better.”
“We found her,” Ex said.
Jay looked from one to the other of us, torn between distrust and hope. Chogyi Jake stepped to the sink and ran water over his injured hand. I felt like the whole world was vibrating. I sat on one of the chairs and rested my head in my hands. Jay took a step toward me, hesitated, and then squatted down at my side. His hand on my shoulder felt almost cold. I expected him to say something, but he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t need to.
“It’s the right place,” Ex said. “You felt the holes where they were?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Is that what I’m like too?”
“Similar,” Ex said. “I didn’t catch wind of their bloodhound, whatever it is.”
“I didn’t either,” Chogyi Jake said, patting the raw spot on his finger with a paper towel. When he was done, he put the used towel in his pocket. “But I believe Carla sensed us at the end. They may move her if they know we’ve found them.”
“Or they may be using her as bait,” I said.
“Bait for what?” Jay asked, his voice gray and empty with dread.
“Me. Her. Us. Whatever,” I said. “We’re not going over there. Not yet.”
Ex lifted his eyebrows.
“You sure about that?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s what everyone expects us to do, and you don’t have to be Admiral Akbar to see it’s a trap. Whatever they’re up to, it’s got to do with Eric and Mom and me. I’m betting Dad has a different perspective.”
“Which he won’t share with you,” Ex pointed out, his arms crossed.
“I’m not the one asking,” I said. “Jay is.”
“I am?”
“If you want Carla back safe,” I said.
My brother coughed and sat back.
“We have to go get her,” he said.
“We have to find out what we’re walking into,” I said. “Running off half-cocked has been pretty much my basic mode, and it doesn’t work as well as you might think. We’ll go talk to Dad.”
“You would really . . .” Jay shook his head, started over. “You’d use this to hold Dad’s feet to the fire. You’d exploit Carla to make him talk about whatever it is he doesn’t want to tell you.”
It wasn’t how I’d thought of it. It wasn’t how I’d framed it. I had a dozen arguments at my fingertips about why it wasn’t like that, and none of them changed what we needed to do. I wondered whether Eric would have done the same: used the missing Carla as leverage, gotten what he wanted, and to hell with everybody else.
Silly question. Of course he would have.
And apparently so would I.
chapter eleven
We got back to the house a little after three in the afternoon, and the sun was already sinking down toward the horizon, pulling out the shadows of bare branches and promising that things would be darker and colder before dinner got served. A school bus trundled down the street, empty of everyone but an ancient-looking driver. I pulled my qi up to my eyes, and the old woman didn’t change. She was just what she appeared to be, and I was a little paranoid. The air had been chilly before, but it was reaching toward cold now. I knew that, with the solstice behind us, the light was supposed to be coming back. It just didn’t seem that way.
The damage to the house was almost invisible if you didn’t know to look. The paint at the side of the front door was a good match to the original shade, but not perfect. Mom was never one to let the house look run-down, but the windows that had survived the assault were just a little bit dimmer than the flashy new glass. Darkened Christmas lights clung to the eaves, and a little patch of snow at the edge of the wall had been churned into mud and ice by the repairmen. I wondered how many favors Dad had pulled in to get it all done so quickly. Maybe there’d been people from church he’d appealed to. Maybe he’d just paid more for rush service. One way or the other, he’d made sure Mom and Curt didn’t go into the new year with cardboard over the windows, and I had to respect him for that. I wished that there had been some way to convince Dad to let me pay for it.