I broke the kiss. Meryl smiled from under her bangs. I leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then ripped the silver branch from her jacket. Even with the storm of sound around us, the brooch made a metallic ping as I flung it among the trilithons. Meryl’s eyes went huge with realization. She lunged for me, trying to use me as her anchor in TirNaNog, but I stepped out of her reach.
“Connor!” Meryl screamed as she felt whatever the sensation was that dropped her out of TirNaNog. She vanished. Somewhere on the other side of the Boston portal, the true side where Boston was and my life had been, a supremely angry druidess was reappearing. I didn’t care. No matter how pissed she was at that moment, she was damned well alive, too.
Joe hovered by my shoulder and spoke very quietly in my ear. “I hope you realize I can’t shield you like she could.”
I nodded. Another gust of Taint blew from the door. The force of it sent Joe into a spiraling tumble as a sliver of intense white light pierced the mottled green. It shot hard and true at me, burning in my mind, the bond solidifying with a brilliant spasm in my head. I caught the spear one-handed, and it pulled me off my feet. It burned in my hand, not with the intense cold it once had, but with a white-hot fire. It stabbed the ground at the foot of the pillar stone, twisting and writhing as it sucked essence from the ring itself, great waves rippling through the stone circle. The Taint channeled into me, coursing down my arm and into the spear.
Standing stones cracked. The entire circle warped and swayed. The stones on the sides of the entrance avenue caved inward, pulling down the standing stones and lintels to either side. The adjacent stones fell next, pulling the next set with them. Standing stone after standing stone after standing stone buckled and fell.
Joe tugged at my ear. “Come on! The Way is closing!”
It was more than closing. It was collapsing. As the standing stones tumbled into the circle, they released torrential waves of essence. The circle was half-gone, a tangled heap of crumbling stone. A boulder came flying through the air. Joe screamed as his body shredded into ribbons of pink. The boulder tore through him, and the shreds scattered outward. Joe was still screaming when he snapped back. “I can’t teleport. The Way is closed!”
“The portal! Get out of here, Joe!” I yelled.
He buzzed into my face. I had never seen him so angry and so afraid. He trembled as he turned this way and that, as if looking for an answer to the destruction around us. He flew off, essence waves knocking him about like a leaf on the wind. He dove at the ground and looped back up. He reached the Boston portal as cracks bled up the standing stones to either side of it. Our eyes met one more time as he paused in front of the haze. He flew through to Boston.
Everyone was safe. I was alone.
CHAPTER 36
I might have made everyone leave me to die, but that didn’t mean I was going to accept my own end sitting down. I’d never get to the portal in time, but simply watching it close felt too much like passive suicide. I had to at least pretend I could reach it, click my heels, make a wish, drop the silver branch, and be transported home sweet home. If I wasn’t going to die in my sleep, I’d be damned if I leaned back, tapping my foot to the ol’ ding-dong of doom. Sometimes delusional thinking has the nice side effect of letting you feel better about yourself. I pulled the spear from the ground.
Essence whipped the air. The standing stones toppled as the ground undulated like viscous liquid. I staggered and stumbled across it, even crawled at one point when the earth welled up in my face. The fallen stones became elastic, oozing into each other in a sludge of moldering essence. The henge outside was a gray-green smear, no discernible features or landmarks. Even the Dead were gone, their body essence absorbed by the maelstrom.
Everything disintegrated, but the spear became more real than ever, a firm purity that drank in waves of released essence. I no longer felt pain from it, not in the physical sense. It radiated through me, a force of light, neither hot nor cold, but a thing of energy, eating up whatever passed for substance inside me. Even the dark mass in my head retreated, not disappearing but shrinking to a mote of nothingness. The forgotten pathways to my abilities unfolded like a lost flower, but the spear’s light rushed in, blocking my ability to manipulate essence as completely as the darkness had. At least I didn’t have a headache anymore.
The earth groaned. The ground heaved, raising me on a hill high enough to see the last portal standing. It glowed a molten blue-white, essence pulsing and flickering as the haze thickened. The groaning deepened to a rumble that rose in volume. A higher-pitched sound sliced through the rumbling, louder and more variable, oddly familiar, but elusive. With a rush of power, it pierced through all the other noise around me until there was no mistaking the distinct sound of an engine.
Crimson essence exploded from the portal. The whine of the engine broke free, no longer muffled, and a police motorcycle soared through the portal. It hurtled upward in an aura of flame, trailing a streak of burning essence. The bike came down fast, landing in front of me, its rear wheel skidding out sideways. Essence billowed over me.
“Don’t just stand there. Get the hell on!” Murdock shouted.
He spun the bike toward the portal. A wave propagated through the ground, and the hill became a gully. Murdock revved the throttle in the face of a growing peak of earth. I barely swung my leg behind him before he let out the clutch. The engine sang as the front tire lifted, and we tore up the hill. We rode the ground swell like a boat riding a wave. At the crest, we went airborne. The engine screamed as the tires spun free.
The portal twisted toward us, the lintel stone cracking and throwing fist-sized chunks of stone. The last of the circle collapsed, and the portal heaved over. Brilliant essence sprang from the spear and tore open the veil.
Images cascaded across my vision, buildings and trees and people, as the bike flew out of the fairy ring. We hit the ground, and the bike skidded from under us. Murdock’s body shield took the brunt of the initial impact, but I rolled free, falling down an embankment until a tree stopped me.
I winced as I propped myself up to catch my breath. Several somethings felt broken inside. The air vibrated with essence, a steady, bass throb against my skin. The wind carried the rich, flinty odor of essence-fire. Flames burned everywhere, and the damaged landscape showed evidence of major exchanges of essence-fire. The great oaks at the top of the hill lay broken and uprooted.
So many people on the Common earlier had set off my riot radar in my old security muscles. The destruction around me confirmed it hadn’t been wrong. The entire Common was in lockdown, empty of the crowd that had streamed to the fairy ring. The only people remaining were fey from the Guild or human police. Even at this distance, Keeva’s essence signature was identifiable up near the statehouse dome. Danann security agents flew in line formations along the surrounding streets, more than I had seen even in the Weird, which was saying something. They weren’t too circumspect about using essence either.
The fairy ring had changed. What had been a hazy funnel of essence had become a soaring column of light, a rich yellow shot with white. The Taint burned along its edges, green and black. Essence trembled the air, radiating from the column with an intense heat. The pillar of the war monument warped under the pressure, the bronze statue of a female warrior at the top leaning forward as though she was going to jump. Municipal emergency vehicles-police cars and motorcycles, EMT vans, fire trucks, and ambulances-raced from beneath its impending fall. Two communications vans had become too deformed to go anywhere.