The other vampire twisted in pain, clashing his fangs, before slumping over, exhausted, muttering, “Our past and I are too broken. Finish it.”
The room shook and the shrieking of the Guardian Beast made the Grey dim and flicker as the tip of the blade sliced upward, flaying open the artery in Edward’s neck. The blood didn’t flow: It dripped, dark and thick, from the wound. Carlos said a few more words in the weird tongue and let Edward fall into the edge of the circle. Wygan hissed and darted to the crumpling vampire, scooping him up and tossing him all the way into the center of the main circle as he threw himself into the remaining small open circle between me and the nearly captive Guardian Beast. Now, Wygan was locked with me into the accelerating motion of the spell.
Edward struck the ground where the temporacline glittered. The floor shook. Slow blood spattered and ran outward. I could see the lingering shadow of his existence shatter and stop, frozen in the instant he expired, borrowed blood still dark on the glassy floor. Goodall slapped his hand down on the lines of the outer circle once again, and another inner ring slammed closed, sending up a curtain of dark fire as the monster of bone and mist surged into it, corporeal and vulnerable as a lamb. The Guardian Beast was captured.
Popping sounds came from above us, punctuating the noise of the grid with unexpected flashes of white light and confusion that barely penetrated to us. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed foreign and removed from what went on here.
The Guardian Beast screamed in frustration as it was caught, dragging my attention back. Then the circle began tightening around it like a noose. I could see Goodall hauling on the threads of it, pulling them somehow through Carlos, drawing the dark lines closer to the construct of the Grey’s wrath even as Carlos fought him. The first touch of the deep purple fire crumbled the Guardian’s spines like rotten wood.
The world screamed around me as the grid burned brighter and brighter with the dissolving essence of the Guardian Beast pouring back into it. The silvery ghost-stuff of the Grey boiled and rippled as if pocked by gunfire. The Beast dwindled and Wygan seemed to unknit, loosening form and essence, giving up his ancient body to reshape himself. . . .
Now, now, now! the chorus screamed. A deeper throbbing note rolled the floor beneath my feet, calling me, and I leapt toward it, diving into the world between. Digging myself into the grid, I heaved on the circle, my own energy flowing into it and tearing at the weak links. I could taste the work of Carlos there, corroding the marks painstakingly prepared by Goodall and Wygan. I could feel true names like sharp stones tumbling away beneath me.
The gleaming fog substance of the Grey stretched all around me, falling away into depths that rippled with color like a lightning storm. Above us, a squall churned the surface, but nothing more. Distant sparkles and sheets of light flashed and vanished, reappearing elsewhere as racing lines that curled through the rolling, constant clouds of ghost-stuff. It was vast and empty, lonely and yet so close, touching and supporting me amid the matrix of its power. The bright-burning wire frame of the energy grid plunged and soared in every direction, sending throbbing lines and curls of magic outward, some thick as sewer pipes, others mere whispers and strands like fallen hair. My heart seemed to expand in my chest, pressing the breath out of me as I stared into the profound and terrible beauty of it. It reflected a sense of satisfaction at my wonder.
The brightness flexed and twisted, throbbing with intensity and engendering a pleasant anticipation. It rippled—the nearest, broadest conduits of power arcing toward me—and I reached for them with open arms. I almost laughed as I stared into it all, seeing the thin threads of the magic circle around me as fragile sketches. I knew I could simply step out of them if I wanted. They were pulled from the grid, and all of that was mine to move as I pleased. I could just . . . disperse into it, out of my restricted physical shell of a body, and be gone. . . .
Then the Grey shrieked again, heaving like a stormy sea and shaking me in my fragile, mortal skin. I could see the Guardian in the coil of the shattered magic circle, reduced to a thin rope of color, twisted too tight, nearly to the breaking point. I reached for it, drawing it toward me by lines of colored light, but I was too late and the rope, pulled in two directions, broke, unwinding and spreading its threads to sink into the grid and scatter like windblown sand across the waves and ripples of the circle, sliding toward Wygan.
As the Guardian Beast unraveled, the Grey broke on the edge of reality and surged outward, battering me back to the surface of the normal for a moment before it tried to suck me back down, back into the depths of the grid. Wygan laughed as the roiling chaos of it washed over us all.
I could see Carlos pushed back by the wave of power flooding the room, shattering his connection to the circle. He fought against the tide, the Lâmina still in his fist, as he turned his attention toward Wygan. Goodall threw himself across the vampire’s path, grappling him down and sending the knife spinning across the floor as the door behind him swung open. Quinton darted in and snapped to a halt, searching for me. But I was hard to see in the rioting, wild magic and fog of the room.
The bloody blade cut through the edges of the circle, destroying the curtains of indigo and purple light. Wygan shivered as the directed power faded and joined the rest of the rampaging energy in the room. “The hard way, then,” he said, chuckling and fixing his gaze on me through the layers of fog and magic.
He was fast, barely corporeal, fed on the Guardian’s death, the rampant noise of the grid, and Will’s terror. He caught my shape easily and hauled it in, taking my head in his ghostly hands like he meant to break my neck. “Now you’ll have to die, my dear. Sometimes we must break our tools.”
“I am not your tool,” I whispered, sinking down toward the grid and away from his flickering physicality. “I’m your doom.”
I’d had a lot of practice in the last twenty-four hours and it was easy to slide away from him, luring him deeper into the Grey, toward the raw surge of magic. He would have more power there, but if he wanted to catch me, he’d have to pursue me toward the grid, shrugging off the physical strength of his body. I would not. And once this confrontation was done, I would not mind dying.
We slipped through the ice storm of the Grey, sinking into the live fire and swell of power lines that shouted and sang into my head. Wygan’s form shivered and lost solidity, but still snakelike, he flowed after me. We twisted as I hunted for a corner of time hard enough to trap him in, racing through the sharp edges of temporaclines as he clawed and bit at me, tearing pieces of my weirdly expanded self away, whittling me back to only body and will.
Each wrenching wound cut through me like a knife, pain I had not expected manifested in the shrieks of the Grey. I thought I grew smaller, shrinking like Alice as she plummeted down the rabbit hole.
But we fell not into Wonderland but into light: light living, crying, mourning its protector while it flooded up and overran its banks, devouring and searching for a shore. It threw me into the whiplash stream of black and red that Wygan had become, and I swam sideways, wound in his lightning grip, dragging him into the tide of shifting time against the slashing edges of temporaclines and monstrous things too old to name.
I cried in agony, growing desperate for the moment I could turn and pin the monster that laughed red-and-gold horror into me. I could feel the Pharaohn’s delight in the treacherous depths of the Grey, his exultation, anticipating my tormented, useless death.
“Here, little girl,” came a whisper of white sparks. “Here.”