Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (15 page)

Kara rolled her eyes. “Come on, smartass.” She put her arm through mine and drew me closer to the group.

Together we all moved forward and, I assumed, through the barrier. It was designed to let trusted members of the organization bring people through, though they had to be able to make a barrier of their own to do it.

We walked about twenty feet, then stopped.

In his customary growl, Williams said, “Drop your personal barriers.”

Yellin looked scared enough to pass out. Everyone else looked tense but focused. Disposing of renegade Seconds was, after all, what Nolanders are for. Idly, I wondered when Yellin had last had to do any dirty work. Probably never.

Kara busied herself with the small backpack she was wearing, which probably contained medical supplies.

“What do we do now?” Liz said.

“Wait,” Williams said.

“For what?”

He glanced at me, then went back to scanning the trees.

Yep, that’s me
. The worm on the hook.

Liz came to attention like a pointer. “It’s coming toward us.”

So it really was me. Innin’s people had been outside the barrier all along. The youngling had ignored them.

Williams loosened the drawstring of the bag containing the carven strait and set it down near his feet. Then he looked at me.

I forced myself to walk calmly over and put my hand in his.

Just touching him made me break out in a clammy sweat. Dread writhed through me. Dread at the pain, dread at what the pain might make me do.

Liz’s brows knitted. “It’s stopped.”

Kara came over. She was holding a syringe.

“Beth, I’m going to sedate you for this.”

“Thank god,” I said.

“No,” said Williams.

“Why the hell not? It hurts her,” said Kara.

“Need her awake.”

“You can carry her if we need to move.”

Kara dabbed the crook of my elbow with an alcohol wipe.

Williams clamped a huge hand around her wrist. “No.”

Kara lost her temper. “Earth to dickhead — we talked about this! Don’t you remember what that isolate looked like?”

I hated that Kara had talked to him about me, even if they were friends. He was the last person in the world I’d have chosen to share anything with. On the other hand, I didn’t want to destroy Rockland County.

“I don’t have any control over my gift,” I ground out, hating him even more for making me say it.

He stared down at me for some torturously interminable length of time that was actually probably only a few seconds.

“Yeah, you do,” he said. “But not if you’re semi-conscious.”

“Son of a bitch!” Kara said. “You’re gonna —”

“It’s coming,” Liz said. She pointed west and began to count down the distance.

“Williams, you are one mean fuck,” Kara said, stuffing her supplies back into her bag.

“Fan out,” he said.

People spread around us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gwen and Zion moving Innin’s people in, flanking the youngling.

I felt Williams push into me in that indescribable way, his capacity to work essence reaching for mine. He didn’t actually take anything — not yet — but it was still grossly invasive. It was hard not to think of it as a kind of rape, like I had to stand there and let myself be violated. Something deep inside of me recoiled from him, and he started swearing under his breath.

For the dead kid
, I reminded myself.
For Thomas Kaits
.

I could still hear Liz counting off the fragment’s approach. When she said “forty feet,” I saw it, a disturbance on the forest floor off among the trees.

Williams murmured, “On my mark.” I heard the command being relayed in both directions.

We waited.

The fragment approached along the ground. When it was four or five body-lengths away, it flowed up onto the trunk of a large tree. There it stayed, undulating spastically. I watched it, waiting for it to spread out and go still, as it had in the tunnel. Waiting for Williams to draw on my capacity and put a barrier around it. But nothing happened. Neither of them seemed willing to make the first move.

Then Yellin shouted “Now!” from right behind us. I startled. So did Williams.

The fragment shot off its tree trunk, and more than a dozen people assaulted it in a storm of fire, water, howling wind, and forces I couldn’t sense.

Williams ripped something huge out of me, and a barrier of worked gases and fluids sprang into existence around the thing. White agony shot through me. Standing was impossible. Kneeling was impossible too. I ended up on the ground, one arm twisted up and backwards to where Williams still gripped my hand. The pain went on and on as the creature attacked the working and Williams poured power into it. It was as though some deep-inside organ I didn’t know I had was continually bursting into flame and pouring the fire out through every cell in my body.

Time slowed. All I could sense was pain and the barrier, a perfect six-foot sphere of super-compressed oxygen, infinitesimally thin, yet so dense ten men couldn’t have shifted it, coated on the inside with layers of spinning air and rushing water.

In the first instant, the youngling had recoiled from the torrent. It didn’t like moving water.

Then it attacked, working gravity to rip the water layer loose. I could feel exactly what the fragment was doing, and I fought to keep the water in place.

No, not me — that’s Williams.

But it felt like I was doing it. I could feel myself holding the water back. The fragment pulled, and I pulled back. I could feel the water down to the grain. I pulled and pulled, and all those tiny water bits quivered under the strain. Then they began to break apart, fizzing into hydrogen and oxygen. For an instant I fumbled at the gases, trying to make them water again —
no, it was Williams doing that
— and the entity surged through to the air layer, seizing the gases, trying to pull their circulation apart. I surprised it by shifting the air layer to a blast of wind powerful enough to punch through the fragment, scattering it into a cloud of dust.

It only bought me a second. Almost instantly, the thing reformed and attacked the outer layer of my barrier, prying at the electrons in the crushed oxygen atoms. I pulled them back in, and when I couldn’t pull hard enough, I jerked the barrier sideways so that the fragment had to attack a fresh spot.

I was tiring, still dizzy from when the fragment broke the water layer.

No, that’s Williams.
It was all Williams. I didn’t even understand what he was doing.

My sense of the barrier began to fade, leaving only pain — endless, unbearable. Then that started to fade as well. It faded until the hurting body seemed a separate thing I was tethered to by a cobweb.

Things got dark.

I came to with the sense of having just hit something.

I hurt in that placeless way that came from having been drawn on. I also hurt more concretely in my back, neck, and head. My right shoulder was a burning knot that felt all wrong. My right arm was limp. I couldn’t move it.

I rolled onto my left side. That didn’t go so well: my right arm dragged along after me, causing a pain spike so extraordinary I nearly passed out.

Once I could think again, I realized I needed to use my left arm to hold my right one against my body so it wouldn’t move so much.

That accomplished, I managed to look around. I couldn’t see Williams, couldn’t see anyone.

No, wait. Williams was on the ground behind me. Awkwardly, I scooted around and took a closer look at him. He was moving a little. Not dead, at least.

I looked for Kara. Lord knows we needed a healer.

There was no sign of her.

Things were different. The trees all around me were leafless and leaning drunkenly or flattened. The ground looked disturbed — leaf matter stripped away, boulders shifted. Everything was very quiet. The scene didn’t make sense. My brain was working slowly, so I let it be and looked again for Kara.

Instead I found the youngling. It was advancing on us through the maze of broken trees.

“Williams.”

He didn’t respond. The thing got closer.

“Shit! Williams!”

I held onto my bum arm and started kicking at him. I couldn’t think what else to do. I was defenseless, and I couldn’t possibly run away fast enough through the drunken forest.

After I kicked him a few times, Williams groaned and moved, then started trying to sit up. He didn’t look to be in good shape.

“It’s coming!”

That got his attention. He lifted himself up woozily, swaying. One of his pupils was bigger than the other.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered, scooting as close to him as I could.

He reached out and grabbed my bum arm, which was so not what I wanted him to do. Maybe my scream helped wake him up a little, because he drew on me and managed to put up a barrier. It hurt, but not as much as it had before. Perhaps the thought of the alternative was helping me be open. Or maybe I was just numb.

The youngling slowed when Williams’s barrier went up, but it kept on coming, slipping through the downed trees and over the disturbed ground.

It reached us and began to attack the barrier. Williams started to shake. I could feel how tenuous his control was.

I sat there awkwardly on the forest floor, watching the seething underneath of the thing plastered against the barrier.

I was so exhausted and in such pain that it was hard to be all that scared. In truth, disgust was the stronger emotion — after all I’d been through, I was going to die by being turned into a human Slurpee, and I was going to be with a loathsome person when it happened.

The defensive barrier definitely gave the fragment more trouble than the containment barrier had, but the thing was strong, and Williams just wasn’t all there. I could feel him struggling to focus. Increasingly, the particles in the barrier escaped his attention, and the fragment began to make headway.

There was nothing I could do to help him. All my perception of the working was really his. I had nothing to give except raw power, and that was only helpful if he was capable of putting it to use.

And eventually, he wasn’t.

The fragment broke through the barrier with an excruciating shock. Williams collapsed against me, knocking me down and pinning me there. Waves of pain lapped through me, and the world swam out of focus. I watched the fragment in the air above me, now itself, now just a wavery smudge, now gone.

Where was it?

When was I going to be a Slurpee?

I lay there, quite at a loss. I couldn’t see anything at all.

Then I realized my eyes were closed. That was the problem.

I opened them and looked up into the bright morning. I saw dark hair and brown eyes shot through with gold.

“Elizabeth Joy Ryder,” Cordus said.

“Okay,” Kara said, rubbing sanitizer on her hands. “How do you feel? Any owies?”

I was in the estate’s infirmary, resting up after being healed. I’d had a ton of bruises, a dislocated shoulder, a mild concussion, and, more surprisingly, two fractured vertebrae in my back.

I’d been brought in a couple hours earlier, treated, and then left alone to wonder what the hell had happened out there. All I’d been told was that my friends were okay.

“I’m fine.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“Really. The pain’s gone.”

“Good,” she said. “We’ll still keep you here ’til tomorrow morning.”

She put her hands on me, and her eyes got that far away look that meant she was using her healing gift to examine me.

“Shouldn’t I go see Lord Cordus?”

I was sort of surprised he hadn’t come to see me, actually.

“You want to see him?”

“No, of course not.” I felt myself flushing. “I never
want
to see him.”

Cordus was the last person Kara ever wanted to see. He was fond of using his gift for mental manipulation to take advantage of people sexually. I’d seen him toy with Kara, and I knew he’d done a lot more than toy with her behind closed doors. She hated him.

He’d never done that to me, though — never taken advantage of me.

“It’s just that he needs to know what Helen Sturluson said,” I said, feeling lame.

“I think Andy and Theo can handle that, Beth. They were there too.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

Kara shifted the blanket and sheet aside and ran her hands gently over my abdomen, humming softly.

“Can I at least have a pillow?”

Her humming paused. “Nope.” She picked up the tune where she left off, looking down at me and smiling at my annoyance.

I stewed for a bit. Then it occurred to me that Kara was my friend, and I was being an ass.

“What’re you humming?”

“Rubén Blades.”

“Who’s that?”

“Seriously, white girl?”

“Kara. You know I don’t know anything about music.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll send you some, okay? It’s the best thing you’ll ever hear.”

“That’s cool. Thanks.”

She took her hands off me and tucked the bedclothes back in. Then she sighed and sat down on the visitor’s chair next to my bed.

“You okay?” I said.

“Yeah, just tired.” She studied me with a serious expression. “Beth, you’re lucky to be alive. When Williams’s barrier went … I’ve never seen anything like it. It was so bright, I couldn’t see anything for a couple minutes.”