Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels) (19 page)

He wasn’t looking at me. He stood still, his expression melting into confusion. I turned to see what had riveted his attention. The woman who’d handed me the first-aid kit. He stared at her like she was impossible. Not so much a ghost as the Wizard of Oz or the Loch Ness Monster.

I turned to look back at him. His shackled hands came up, reaching out. “Mom?”

Chapter 14

MOM?

I may have stopped breathing. I turned to look at the woman. Now I could see why she looked familiar. She and Price shared the same bone structure, the same high cheekbones, lips, raven hair, and straight brows.

“Are you really here?” Price asked, and there was a wealth of hope in his voice. He scowled. “Or is this a trick?”

“I’m here,” his mother confirmed, making no effort to close the distance between them. Her eyes had narrowed, and she looked anything but happy. Price read her coldness. His hands fell. He looked like he’d been kicked.

“The FBI brought you here, didn’t they?” He asked, his voice lifeless.

“They thought I could help,” she said with a little nod.

“Help them to break me.”

I could tell he wanted her to deny his words, to say she’d come to help him. She didn’t.

“I promised I’d help them however I could. They needed to see you for what you are so that you can finally be destroyed.”

His head tipped. “What am I, exactly?”

I reached out and gripped his arm as the magic around us seemed to spasm.

His mother’s face contorted with a mixture of powerful emotions, then smoothed back into a mask. “You are an abomination. A demon from the depths of hell. Satan’s own spawn.”

Each word was a bullet. Price flinched as they struck, his eyes widening. But his mother wasn’t done.

“I tried. Oh, the Lord above knows how much I tried, but there was no saving you and no stopping you. You needed to be destroyed. I knew it when I gave birth to you and every day after. I tried everything, but your father didn’t believe me. He said it was just your talent manifesting early, that I’d see how wrong I was, but I wasn’t wrong. You carry the very soul of the devil inside of you.”

I couldn’t help but stare. Was this bitch for real? Yes. Her eyes had lit with the fervor of her screed, and she meant every word.

“I tried everything, even taking you to an exorcism in South America, in one of the holiest places on earth. You destroyed it!” Her voice rose. “You slaughtered everyone. You’re evil and you need to be destroyed!”

She stabbed a finger at Price, her whole body shaking. He just stared. I had a bad feeling he was buying the crap she was selling. Soaking it in like a dry sponge. The magic around us flickered wildly.

“What a fucking bitch you are,” Taylor said, coming to stand in front of Price as if to protect him. “With a mother like you, I’m surprised he
isn’t
some sort of demon, which he’s not.
You
are certainly an evil witch.”

“Do you think it easy to kill your own child?” Oriana Price demanded. She looked at Jamie. “You see how dangerous he is. That’s why you tried to cut off his hands. That’s why you bound him.
You
know what I say is true.”

Before Jamie could respond, Price spoke. “She’s right,” he rasped. “I killed so many.” He closed his eyes, his face white as milk.

He was remembering that long-ago trip to Belize. I was sure he was replaying the long-forgotten memory in his head. But he’d been three years old, dragged to the back end of nowhere, in order to have some religious fanatics exorcise his God-given talent. What had they done to that terrified boy? I couldn’t imagine, but it had sent him into such a frenzy of fear and horror that he’d unleashed disaster just to protect himself.

“He protected you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have survived,” I said furiously, turning on his mother. “Yet you call him evil. You know what evil really is? It’s a mother who takes her toddler son from his home and family, gives him to strangers, and encourages them to inflict who knows what kind of horrors on him. Then you have the gall to show up here thirty years later to do it all over again. From where I stand, you’re the only one in this room who has the track record to claim the title of Spawn of Satan, so you can just go to right back to hell where you come from,” I said.

I wondered if Touray or his father knew that she’d been behind Price’s kidnapping way back when. I doubted it. I didn’t know their father, but I couldn’t imagine Touray wouldn’t have taken some revenge for Price’s suffering.

I turned to face Price. “Forget her. She’s batshit crazy. You’re one of the best men I’ve ever met.”

Price looked past me at his mother. His eyes widened, and he grabbed me and yanked me toward him as he leaped past Jamie and Taylor, shouting. In the same moment, gunshots blasted. Time slowed. I straightened and whirled in time to see Price stagger back. All the magic that had hung so thick in the air exploded. The last thing I saw as I catapulted through the air were his eyes. They’d gone totally white. I curled my arms over my head to protect it and braced to hit the wall or the ceiling or the floor.

Only I didn’t hit. I settled down as if on a pillow. Time sped up again. The floor rippled and shook. Walls flattened. I twisted to stand up, but something held me down. Debris flew through the air, and I flinched from it. It bounced away without touching me. Chunks of masonry, dust, chairs, and tables from the outer room. None of it landed on me. Again I struggled to get up. I couldn’t. It was like I was in a cocoon. I couldn’t twitch a finger.

Magic tumbled around me in frothing waves. Their strength built higher. A sound started low. It grumbled and snarled and turned into a roar until it wrapped me like a massive tornado. All around me the air whirled. Debris came at me and flew past, leaving me unhurt. Soon a mound built over me. Blind panic hit when the darkness closed and I could no longer see.

I lost it. I couldn’t think, couldn’t calm down. Later I would remember I could have just dropped into the spirit dimension and escaped that way, but my claustrophobia had me in its teeth and I couldn’t think of anything else.

I must have passed out eventually. Maybe I hyperventilated. Or maybe I just went catatonic. When I noticed myself again, I was in a state of total immobile hysteria. My heart raced, my chest ached with jagged cramps. I was so high on adrenaline, my heart felt like it was about to blow. Panic-sweat soaked my clothes all the way through. If I’d had the room, I could have made sweat angels on the ground. As it was, I lay there, feeling the terror mounting higher as I returned to awareness. It should have plateaued or my body should have gotten bored with feeling all that fear and not having anything to do with it. It didn’t. I was on overload and heading for meltdown. Tremors shook me like a baby’s rattle. A thin layer of nothing held a mound of crushing death above me. When would it give? When would it fall on me and I’d be buried alive?

What had happened?

The question was stupid. Price had happened. And his mother. Oh God! She’d shot him. I hadn’t seen where the bullet hit.
Fear for him roared up inside me. Maybe she’d missed. I remembered the way he’d jerked back. No, the bitch had been less than twelve feet away from him. Even Elmer Fudd couldn’t miss at that range.

I had to get out of here. I lay facedown, with my head twisted to the right, my hands curved up toward my face. I pushed up with all my might. Nothing. Why I thought I’d be able to get out now better than before, I had no idea. Logic wasn’t actually something I was using at the moment. I pressed my head into the cold cement floor and closed my eyes. As fear rose up over me again, I forced myself to count breaths inside and then out, and I didn’t let myself think of anything else. Slowly, I found myself relaxing. If you could call ratcheting down from overload to just completely terrified. I kept breathing. It’s not like I was going anywhere.

That’s when I remembered I could travel through the trace dimension. Oh, for fuck’s sake. I was a total idiot. Instantly, I opened myself up to it and tried to fall inside.

Nothing happened. I didn’t know if the cocoon was stopping me or my immobility. Okay, then. How did I get into the trace dimension if I couldn’t actually move? I took stock. My nulls. I had one tattooed on my belly and one on my scalp. I had used them both recently and hadn’t fully recharged them. Even at full strength, I didn’t think they could take down the magic-formed cocoon or the magic storm raging around me. The rest I’d brought with me were in my pack. Fat lot of good they did me there. That left just the spirit world. Or waiting. Since the last one seemed more likely to end in death than not, I decided I had better make option one work for me.

The nice thing about having your mind occupied with a goal is that fear stops being quite so all encompassing. It wasn’t gone, but at least I was back in my head’s driver’s seat for the moment.

After contemplating a few minutes, I decided my only option was to open the door on the spirit world inside myself and travel through the spirit world that way. Easy peasy. And for my next trick, I’d fly to Mars and back, and then jump a tornado to Munchkinland.

The trouble was, I didn’t know if what I wanted to do was even possible, much less how to do it. I took a breath and let it out and focused my attention on the problem. I could open myself to the trace, which meant I was halfway to getting into the spirit world. I could summon my magic. Could I use it to pull myself into the trace dimension? To open up a door?

I’d never done anything like that before. Usually I channeled my magic into an object, most often creating nulls. I didn’t have a lot of other things I
could
make. Other times I was able to pull magic from a spell, unwinding the power, then channeling it into a null. I couldn’t throw magic the way movie wizards and witches did. I relied on touch to move the magic from me to an object. That, of course, was the problem. I couldn’t move, and I was cocooned inside hard air, or so it seemed. My trace sight told me it was made of magic. The optimist in me held on to the hope that the cocoon was proof some part of Price knew me, that I could reach him.

I chewed my lips and tasted dust. I expect I was covered with it from head to toe. Now that I thought of it, it itched at my eyes and tickled my nose. I sneezed, then twice more in quick succession. This whole situation was turning torturous. Now something felt like it was crawling up my back. An ant maybe. I pushed myself up against the cocoon and wriggled. The crawling sensation went away. For now.

I was wasting time. I didn’t want to fail, and most of me thought that I would. Trace magic just wasn’t meant to be an active power. It was passive, the kind that waited for its prey to walk into it before it chomped. An alligator rather than a lion. Right now, I needed lion power.

You’re the strongest tracer in living history, as far as anybody else seems to know. If anybody can travel through their own trace, you can
. I told myself this and kept repeating it in my head so that the piranha doubts couldn’t grab hold. I had to get out and stop Price. My family’s lives were at stake. Price’s life was at stake. Not to mention the FBI agents imprisoned in the building, and who knew how far the damage would go.

I summoned magic into me. Normally, I’d let it flow through, but this time I held it. Before long I got light-headed. My body felt fizzy, and tickling warmth swirled down my arms and legs and up through my head. I squinched my eyes shut as the carbonated feeling hit them. Not entirely comfortable.

The pressure built inside me. How much would I need? How much was too much? I decided to err on the side of blowing open a door versus not succeeding at all, and took as much as I could hold.

Now for the tricky part. Which is to say, the part where I played mad scientist and experimented in the hopes I got it right and didn’t kill myself in the backlash of failure. Or even success, for that matter.

I’d kept myself open to the trace. I felt the spirit dimension waiting just beyond. Could I send magic through my trace and somehow use it to pull myself inside? I focused on my trace ribbon and sent magic shooting down it. I wasn’t sure what I thought would happen. Like I said, mad-scientist time.

I braced myself. Nothing. The magic dissipated out along my trace, like pouring ink into water. I needed to anchor it somehow so that I could pull myself along. Could I flare it out somehow to catch on the edge of the spirit dimension, like a grapple? Though it seemed completely impossible to me, with nothing to lose, I tried anyway. I concentrated, pushing the flowing power to divide and spread. I put all my strength of will into my working. I about fainted when tendrils of power answered me, unwinding from each other and spreading out into trace space. My heart thudded.

I pushed the strands outward, trying to curl them into hooks. The result looked like tangled spaghetti. That wasn’t going to cut it. I focused on one of the tendrils, straightening and then curving it back on itself. By the time I was done, my entire body ached and I was sweating like a horse. Worse, the other four energy tendrils had returned to the flow. Fine. I only needed one good hook to dig in and hold.

I whirled it in a circle, feeding more energy into it to lengthen the line. I panted as holding the energy grew harder and harder. I felt myself shaking. Or maybe it was the rest of the world. The floor continued to buck and rear. I had no idea how much time had passed.

I scrunched my eyes tight and bit my lower lip. I clenched my whole body and strengthened my effort.

To no avail. I made a grunting sound of pure frustration. There had to be a way to get the fuck out of this cocoon.
Think, Riley, think!
If only I could grab hold of my trace—

Wait. My forehead furrowed. God, I was stupid. My trace was nothing more than a magical umbilical cord. It was anchored inside me, body and soul. I was
always
touching it. Travelling along it should be one step easier than using my hands to grab it. So why did it feel like I was about to jump into a blender full of broken glass?

Damn, but I wished I knew what I was doing. I wished that my mother had lived to teach me. I could visit her for a few minutes at a time in the spirit world, but that didn’t make for a good classroom. Plus if my dad—Vernon—wasn’t lying about Mom being a grifter, and that was a big
if
, then I couldn’t really trust my mom either.

I determinedly pushed away that worry. None of that mattered at the moment.

I sank into myself, searching for my link to my own trace. How had I never tried this before? Maybe because it felt a little touchy-feely stupid. Like one of those new-agey programs of self discovery. I snorted. Okay, maybe they weren’t so stupid. If I’d actually ever tried one, I might have learned something useful. I had given meditation a shot once or twice. This felt a little bit like that. ’Course I’d never been any good at it. Firefly thoughts kept buzzing into my head and distracting me. Like the fact that my boobs were killing me. Or that I was getting a crick in my neck. Or that I really wanted a jug of sweet, creamy coffee. I fought them off and concentrated on the power rushing into me. And out.