Lies and Prophecy (37 page)

“One moment, if you please.”

Robert's incongruously polite interruption startled both Julian and Falcon out of their focus. Robert had retreated with Liesel to a corner, but now he stepped forward, diffidently, as if hoping one of the Guardians would save him should someone decide to tear his head off. As if he wasn't sure which one it would be, his roommate or the sidhe. Behind him, Liesel had her hands pressed to her mouth, and tears ran along her fingers.

“I still have difficulty with your telepathic technique,” Robert said with a forced laugh. “So I'm not certain whether I have interpreted your words correctly. She can't be helped
now,
you say. By that, do you mean the time to help her has passed—or that it has not yet come?”

A tiny spark of hope flared within Julian.

But Falcon shook his head. “The time will never come. By the time the conditions are right, she will be dead, or too long under their control.”

“What conditions?” Julian whispered.

The sidhe clamped his lips into a thin line, refusing to answer. But Shard spoke, from behind Julian. “The two worlds. To touch her human nature, the Unseelie worked in this world, and caught her spirit as it moved. But now she is split too much between the two, and you cannot reach her completely. In our world, you will miss that part of her which is human, and here you will miss that which is sidhe.”

Caught her spirit as it moved.
When Falcon spoke of the powder, Julian hadn't thought about its implications. They'd precipitated the same crisis in Kim that made a wilder—or killed someone with the psi-sickness. There were many more of the latter than the former. How close had she come to dying?

It was done with. The future mattered more. “So at the solstice—”

Shard shook her head. “That will only open the doors. The worlds will meld in time, but not soon. Years, perhaps. I have not looked ahead to see.”

He didn't think she was lying. It sounded right; in fact, he was willing to bet the meld would spread as the connection had before it, following sympathetic and contagious links.

But power and sidhe blood weren't the only things that had thinned the veil here. “Then we'll force it,” Julian said. “Like I did before, with the summoning circles.”

He'd never seen a sidhe come that close to open-mouthed shock. “You think to move whole
worlds
?” Falcon said. “I have heard of human arrogance, but this is beyond belief.”

“Not whole worlds,” Julian said, the idea taking shape in his mind. “Just a tiny portion of them.”

He looked instinctively to his roommate and saw Robert considering it, as if this were a theoretical assignment Grayson had set. The professor herself stood silently, and the other Guardians watched her, waiting for a cue. “Blood calls to its home,” Robert said. “The best would be to put sidhe here, and humans in the Otherworld; then they anchor themselves where they stand, and summon their homes to them.”

“The Circle,” Liesel whispered. Her face was still wet with tears, but she'd lowered her hands, revealing a surprising degree of resolve. “They're still here. And they're connected. They would do it, to get Kim back.”

Grayson said, “We can defend you while you work.” She was too professional to say more, but Julian thought he saw pride in her eyes, for all three of them—even Liesel, who had never been her student.

Then she turned to the sidhe—addressing Shard, not Falcon, who still looked mutinous. “Will it work?”

“I do not know,” Shard said. “Not everything can be seen. But it is a possibility.”

“Then we'll do it.” Julian only needed a slim chance. The rest, they would do for themselves.

~

They didn't race out of Grayson's office to perform the ritual on the spot. Something like this couldn't be done off the cuff; it had to be planned, and checked, and checked again, with wiser heads offering advice. They chose their battleground: the wasteland on the riverbank, where Julian had first been attacked. They chose their people: seven humans, seven sidhe, with Guardians to protect them. They chose their configuration: Robert and Liesel with Falcon and Shard on the inner circle, and the remaining ten on the outer.

In the end, however, it would come down to Julian and Kim.

He spent the hour beforehand cross-legged on the floor of his room, deep in meditation. For this, he could not afford any missteps. He had to banish every last distraction from his mind, every emotion that might weaken his focus. All the discipline of his childhood might have been intended for this one moment, when any error would bring a fate much worse than gutting.

A clumsy nudge to his mind brought him out of trance. Robert stood before him, worry written plainly on his face. Not just for what they would do tonight, but for Julian himself. There were certain kinds of details Robert noticed, and he would not have missed the ones before him now: the black clothes, the grim expression, and the long box on the floor in front of Julian.

His roommate nodded warily at the box as Julian rose to his feet. “How exactly do you intend to use that?”

“Any way I have to,” Julian said, shrugging into his coat.

It didn't reassure Robert, but it wasn't meant to. There wasn't any reassurance to be had, tonight. Julian stooped to pick up the box, and when he straightened, he found Robert staring at him with both fear and pity. “One way or another,” Julian said, “I will free her.”

~

The others were waiting for them at the riverbank. The Palladian Circle stood in a wide-eyed clump, nervous of the Guardians' presence. Julian wondered if they'd seen the sidhe yet. He wasn't about to ask. He was grateful enough for their aid, without doing anything to remind them of what it was for.

They flinched back from him, too. For once, though, he didn't think it was because he was a wilder. Julian couldn't spare the effort right now for any pretense. The coldness inside was plain for all to see.

Michele came forward, though, and shook his hand. The gesture meant a great deal, even though their gloves protected her from skin contact. Hers were thick ski gloves; his were the same black leather he'd worn on Samhain. She fixed her gaze just below his eyes and said, “Lord and Lady bless you, Julian.”

“Thank you.” He nodded at the rest of them, and then Liesel came forward and hugged him hard.

“Bring her back to us,” she whispered.

The air thrummed with rising power, and the sidhe stepped through.

It almost seemed as if part of the riverbank's lost vegetation had reappeared, amidst the flat and featureless snow. Even in the dark night, the colors glowed vivid and strange. The portal wasn't a door, though; it didn't exist only in two dimensions. The effect was more like a summoning circle, with a patch of the Otherworld appearing on the ground, and the sidhe stepping out of it.

Julian sensed Liesel extending her support to the rest of the Circle, and them accepting it. Led by their empath's resolve, and escorted by Grayson and the female Guardian, they went through, and then the portal vanished behind them.

Leaving him alone with the other Guardian and seven of the Seelie.

“Are you prepared?” Shard asked.

Julian answered by shrugging out of his coat and tossing it outside the snowy circle they had once blasted clean. He scarcely felt the cold as he carried the box to the center of that space; his mind had already sunk inward, preparing. Falcon and Shard took up positions on either side of him, Shard in the east, Falcon in the west. The other Seelie positioned themselves in a larger ring around the three of them, spacing themselves equally.

Then they grounded themselves in the earth and began to pull.

The sidhe chanted nothing, made no ritual gestures. They didn't have to. For them, magic was a matter of will alone. Even for them, however, this was an epic undertaking, and although their serenity never wavered, he felt the effort.

Then he felt something more: the motion of the worlds. They shifted slowly, grudgingly, stretching in unaccustomed ways in order to draw closer to each other. The sidhe part of his own nature hummed in response. Closer. And closer.

They slid together with a stomach-turning wrench.

Robert and Liesel materialized, seemingly from nowhere, standing in the south and the north on either side of Julian, and beyond them the rest of the Circle appeared in the gaps between the sidhe.

But Julian knew, before he even saw them, that the two worlds had merged. He sensed it, bone-deep, and for the first time in his life knew that he was
home.
A tension he hadn't felt until it was gone melted away. The human world rejected the part of him that was sidhe, and the Otherworld did the same to the human … but in this place he truly belonged.

He wanted to luxuriate in the feeling, but he sensed the strain in Liesel's shoulders, felt in his own jaw the force of Robert's clenched teeth, and knew he couldn't spare the time. He had to hurry.

Julian reached out with his mind to find Kim.

It wasn't like seeking someone between worlds, or even like searching within the mortal world. It was easier than either—far easier. Standing in this place gave him strength he'd never had before.

There.

Even with the alterations, there was no mistaking her aura. Julian began to chant, using the words to direct his will, summoning her to this place of merging.

Resistance. She didn't want to come. And the resistance built; the Unseelie were trying to hold her where she was. But they weren't prepared for this, and the glade where the two worlds met was as native to her as it was to Julian. It called to her with a power she could not resist.

Julian opened his eyes and found her standing barely twenty feet from him.

Even though he was prepared for it, the sight of her twisted his stomach into a knot. It was Kim, but not: familiar features cast in an inhuman mold, familiar expressions distorted with cruelty and disdain. But the focus he'd given her hung around her neck, crystal wrapped in silver. He had to believe that, like the pendant, the Kim he knew was still there, somewhere. Could still be saved.

While he was distracted, she struck.

A lance of pure magical force, driving straight toward him. But Julian had been shielded before this ever began, and Grayson's training served him well. When he spun the blow off, it shattered against a shield now covering the four of the inner ring. A similar barrier glowed around the outer circle. The Guardians were doing their job—leaving him to do his.

But before he could help Kim, he had to fight. She flung a second blow at him, a third. He parried them and cursed himself. Stupid, stupid. He'd worried about the Unseelie following Kim here, but he hadn't stopped to consider the danger
she
represented. She was one of them. He was the enemy. Of course she would attack.

Kim threatened him with fire, superheating the air around him. He diverted the energy skyward, but not easily, though pyrokinesis had once been a weakness of hers. Levinbolts slammed into his shields, one after another, as fast as he could sink their force into the ground. Untutored, but strong, and she maintained her own shields with raw power against his attacks.

Julian bored away at her protections, seeking weakness. He had to work quickly; he didn't know how long the meld could be maintained. But they hadn't been able to guess in advance what he'd find, much less what he could do about it, and Kim wasn't giving him a chance to study anything. He had to get inside her defenses.

Gathering his strength, he struck out with a massive blow that sent her reeling for just a moment.

In that heartbeat of vulnerability, he reached through and seized hold of her spirit.

But in his lunge to do so, he left himself open, and even as his psychic grip closed on her he felt hers do the same. Their two minds struggled in a deadlock, each trying to wrestle the other into submission.

Kim. Listen to me. Hear my voice.

There was no sign that she heard, nothing in her expression except cold, unblinking determination.

This isn't you. They've bound you against your will. You can break free; you're human, not sidhe. Break it. Come back to us. Come back to me.

No reaction. She merely tightened her grip. This pain was familiar: the Unseelie had tried the same thing, hoping to warp him to their pattern. But they had failed, and she would, too. All she could do was hurt him. So long as he accepted the pain, and didn't let it distract him, he was free to work on
her.

His mind slid over the shields within hers, sensing the changes, seeking their cause. It had to be there,
somewhere.
But he found nothing before Kim realized the futility of her efforts and shifted her energy to something new.

Julian screamed as she drove a wedge at his mind. It struck at the boundary between his sidhe-born gifts and his human self, trying to sunder them. He had never
not
been a wilder, had never known what it was to be without that Otherworldly touch. Now Kim's attack threatened to alienate him from himself, splintering his sanity, making his own gifts foreign and uncontrollable—like the men and women who had gone mad during First Manifestation. Julian fought to stop her, but the sharp edge of her attack pierced his defenses as quickly as he built them up, and he could not both protect himself and work against her for long.

Forcing down his own growing panic, Julian hardened his focus to a diamond edge. He dragged vainly at Kim's mind, striving to bring her back to herself, but there was no net for her to slip free of, no binding he could cut. It had to be there somewhere, but he couldn't feel it, and couldn't affect it. There was nothing he could attack. And while he searched, her own strikes came closer and closer to destroying him.

Julian pulled back at the last instant before she broke through, and only his will kept despair at bay. He couldn't do it. He'd thought he could—had
insisted
it would be possible—but there was nothing for him to work on. Kim couldn't be brought back.