Chapter 14

T he darkness clings to me like a sticky resin, as if the shadows are a substance akin to pine sap. There is no sight—no motion, no direction.

"Best not dally," Zirae says, his voice so close to my left ear I can feel his breath huffing hot. "This isn't a very hospitable place, especially for silly girls."

I lash out with my sword, but it meets no resistance.

"Now, now—temper, temper." He giggles, breathy, lunatic. Something cold and sharp pricks the back of my neck. "Got you!"

I stab backward hard and fast, without thought—I hear a yelp.

His laughter echoes, doubles, trebles, overlapping until I'm surrounded by the mad cackling of a thousand maniacs.

Wind blows past my face, stinking of rotten meat and coffee breath. Something titanic slithers past my ankles, its touch colder than ice, making my bones ache.

" ZIRAE !" I scream, hating the hate in my gut like acid. "What do you want?"

"Oooooohhoooo!" he giggles in a demented singsong. "Someone is getting cranky. What do I want?" That cold hard touch slices across my armor at my bicep—hot and then cold. "I want your suffering. I want your madness. I want your hate. I want you , Maeve Sparrow, Once-Mortal Bitch, WorldBreaker, whore. I want you—I want to devour your pathetic little soul."

I can feel my prana within me—I can't use magic in The Dreaming, but perhaps here I can. I conjure a small ball of light, a bright globe the size of a baseball hovering over my palm. It illuminates the area immediately around me—there's nothing to see but more darkness…and a flickering, moving shadow.

There, to my left. I hurl the ball of light at the shadow—it sticks to him like a burr to dog fur. I lunge at him, swiping with my sword. He parries, turning my sword aside with ease; my light-ball adheres to the center of his back, casting long shadows of his form on this world of nothingness. Zirae whirls away from me, dancing lithely. He stabs at me with his knife—I dodge, twisting my torso aside, spin on my heel, and swing my sword around in a flat arc. He sucks in his belly and bends forward, just barely avoiding the sharp, whistling tip.

He dances backward, grinning, doing a wild, mad little jig while wiggling his knife at me. "Almost got me with that one!" Abruptly, the grin vanishes, the jigging stops, and he glares at me with baleful intensity. "Enough."

He flips the knife around so the point faces down, holds my eyes with his, unblinking, and stabs backward. His eyes flash greenish-white with a flare of power—I catch another whiff of rotting meat and coffee breath, the stench of his twisted magic. The knife blade buries into the blackness up to the hilt; he twists the handle 90 degrees and then rips it horizontally sideways with a hard, violent wrench of his arm, his whole body twisting with effort.

Wind howls and rushes, and a splinter of light pierces the darkness. Heat billows through the rip, heat that smells of hot sand and stale wind.

There's a soft, distant groan behind me, and the air around me shudders. I feel my heart pound—I feel like a small, defenseless mouse, and behind me is a huge, hungry predator with a morsel in plain view.

Zirae cackles again. "They smell the mana out there, you know. They smell it and they want it."

He yanks his knife free, spins it on his palm, and gestures at me with it, a repeat of the follow-me gesture.

I have no choice but to follow, do I? I have no way out of this place except where he goes. I think I have an idea how he's doing this, but this is no time to experiment—I have to end Zirae once and for all and get back to my mates and the mess in Manhattan.

Zirae ducks through the rip in the shadow-realm—beyond, blinding light and shades of yellow.

I follow Zirae through the gap and into a world of blinding sun and oppressive heat. I squint, staggering under the sudden assault of light and heat.

At that moment, I catch a glimpse of Zirae, naked but for a loin cloth, swiping at me with his knife. I dodge, but not fast enough—the blade slices across my hip, creasing my blood armor and the skin beneath it. The sudden burning tells me the knife is no normal blade—poisoned, is my guess.

I hiss at the dull ache that sets in.

Zirae wiggles the knife at me. "Like it? Made it myself. Poisoned prana. You'll feel the effects soon enough."

I don't bother answering. I feel the effects already—a sluggishness in my muscles, a dulling of the senses.

I turn part of my attention inward, assessing: my ocean of prana is stained a toxic bright green at the edges. I decide, perhaps belatedly, that trying to fight with a weapon I have no training in is a losing game—I'm not a warrior.

I draw prana, let it surge through me, filling my mind and body and spirit—I feel the taint of the poison, however. Perhaps I can burn it off or use enough prana to bleed out the effects.

Zirae is watching me, his posture deceptively casual and upright. "What to do, what to do, what to do, eh?" He singsongs, bobbing his head side to side to the rhythm of his singsonging speech. "You know, we don't have to be enemies. I could teach you. Make you my apprentice. You have a shocking amount of potential, I admit. You and me, together? We could take over. Who could stand against us? No one. Not even your precious Alpha Prime."

"I'd rather die," I spit.

He cackles. "That can be arranged!"

He lunges, snake-swift, the vicious tip of his poisoned knife slicing toward my belly. I twist to the side, bringing my sword up to block; he stiffens the fingers of his free hand into a claw, palm up, and wrenches his arm upward as if lifting a heavy weight. Beneath me, the earth itself shudders, trembles, and then abruptly rockets skyward…with me on it.

My stomach hurtles to my feet as I'm launched airborne—the wedge of earth he used to fling me up halted after about twenty feet, now a jagged outcropping of granite.

Tumbling and twisting, I windmill my arms, floating for a heart-lurching instant—and then I'm falling, falling, falling. If I don't do something— now —I'll land on the uplifted column of rock and be smashed into wet bits.

With panic flaring in my gut and prana seething in my veins, I let instinct take over, closing my eyes and relaxing into thoughtless autopilot.

Help me, Mother , I whisper to myself mentally. Help me.

The earth hurtles up toward me, and my stomach is in my throat now, at my teeth. I summon wind, a straight-line blast of hurricane-force spewing skyward. It knocks me tumbling head over heels—I splay my arms and legs out wide like a skydiver, and it catches me, spins me along my long axis, and then I find a sort of balance, on my belly, facing down—a hundred feet above the earth, Zirae staring up at me with amusement.

He bares his teeth at me in a hateful rictus and then lashes out with his fist, eyes flaring with prana. His strike knocks a huge chunk of rock free from the column, and then he whips his knife hand upward, and a gust of wind launches the chunk of rock at me like a cannonball.

Another, and another, and another—four in machine-gun succession. Still precariously balanced on a geyser of wind, I conjure a shield. Just in time—the jagged chunk of stone shatters on the shield, and then the other three follow. With each impact, the kinetic transference shudders me backward and out of balance, and suddenly I'm tumbling downward once more.

Zirae snaps his fingers, eyes flaring green-white, and he whips his arm at me as if throwing a ball—a rippling globule of white mage-flame rockets toward me, aimed to intersect my descent as if I'm a clay pigeon as he's at a shooting range.

I tuck myself into a ball and blast myself with a short gust of wind from the side, sending me spinning and twisting at an angle—I feel the searing ball of mage-flame scorch past my ribcage.

He has me on the defensive, and I'm going to lose. I have to turn it back on him. But how?

Still tumbling down, Seconds pass like minutes—like hours.

From this vantage point, I catch a quick glimpse of the world I've found myself in: a vast, endless, barren wasteland of cracked, parched, hardpan earth, featureless and waterless. A desert, clearly. I wish I'd paid more attention to world geography.

Not that it matters—unless I figure out how to even the playing field against Zirae, I'm going to die, and soon.

A spark of creativity hits, and I put it into motion immediately: conjure a small flat square shield beneath me and summon wind from below—the shield acts like a sail, catching the wind and arresting my momentum. A slight adjustment to the wind's velocity, and now I'm hovering.

Moving slowly and carefully, my focus straining between holding the wind and shield simultaneously, I work to my feet, standing on the shield. It feels like standing on a mattress, soggy and sinking, yet I also feel the precarious balance tipping and shifting with every minute adjustment of my weight.

Zirae gazes up at me, amused. "Now what? Hmm? Going to hover up there until you run out of prana or I knock you off with a fireball?"

He launches another one at me to punctuate his question; it flies wide past my head, but even flinching as it passes by makes me wobble and windmill my arms.

I growl to myself. This is a stupid predicament.

I let the wind drop, and I hurtle downward, crouching on the shield as air screams past my face. Zirae hurls fireballs at me in machine-gun succession, each one sizzling closer and closer. Every instinct tells me to call the wind to stop my fall, but I ignore it. Not yet. Not yet.

Ready an offensive glamour: A line of prana lanced into the earth beneath Zirae's feet—he sees it, but until I engage the glamour, he can't do anything about it.

At the last second, barely a dozen feet above the ground, I shoot to my feet and call the wind in a hard, wide, spewing fountain that halts my momentum so abruptly I'm flattened against the shield like a bug splatting against a windshield.

Zirae laughs at me. "What a delightful performance, WorldBreaker! Where's all your vaunted Secundus power?"

Without moving—because I can't, yet—I send my will surging down the ley line running beneath Zirae's feet. CRACK! The earth itself splits open like a yawning maw—the rumble and grind of tectonic plates shifting is deafening, shaking the whole world, it feels like.

Zirae screams as the earth he stands upon vanishes, sending him hurtling down toward… what? The center of the earth? I let go of the shield and wind, collapsing to the hard hot cracked ground. Groaning as every bone in my body protests from the sudden violent halt, I release the glamour holding the earth open—it wants to close, needs to close, and I let it.

Another rumble shakes the ground with such violence that my teeth rattle in my skull. I work to my feet just in time to see the six-foot-wide crack in the earth shudder closed, leaving no trace that it ever existed.

A seed of hope germinates in my gut—it can't be that simple, can it?

No. Another, softer, quieter rumble trembles underfoot, this one not of my doing. I gather my prana, still feeling the sickly, sluggish effects of the poison—less, now, thankfully. My armor must have absorbed the worst of it.

A mound of dirt erupts where Zirae vanished—like the old cartoons of a chipmunk tunneling underneath the black and white cat. Or something like that—I was never much for cartoons.

A second later, Zirae crawls out of the earth, caked in dirt so thick only his eyes and teeth show white—the former glaring with hate, the latter bared like an animal.

"Nice try, Once-Mortal Bitch." He spits dirty saliva at his feet. "Time to die."

"You first, you sick, decrepit old monster." I launch a fireball at him out of pure spite.

He deflects it with his bare hand, casually and with an annoyed sigh. "You'll have to try harder than that."

He swipes his hand at me, fingers stiff, palm flat and horizontal, like a blade. A razor-thin disc of solidified air slices at me—I duck just in time.

Fuck the games. I'm done with this cat-and-mouse bullshit.

I launch a battering ram of air at him, but it's just a distraction. He leans into it and lets it knock him skidding backward. Now, I do channel something remembered from a show I used to watch after school in junior high: Avatar: The Last Airbender .

Taking a page from Zirae's book—something I'm loathe to admit I do far more than I'd like—I use my prana to rip a chunk of earth free from the ground and launch it at him, hauling at the titanic mass with both hands as if pulling a rope. The ten-foot-high and wide chunk of dirt and rock smashes into him from the left. I'm already jerking a second block out of the ground and screaming as I haul it the other way to smash into him from the opposite side. It becomes a flowing sort of dance, then, like a kata—Toph stomping and punching and hurling, sending mountains of stone and rock flying and smashing and exploding.

Fury powers my movements—fucking Zirae, hijacking me at the worst possible moment. I jerk and redirect, smashing him from every side without pattern until he's sagging on his hands and knees, gasping, spitting blood, coughing wetly.

He collapses to his belly, hands trapped beneath him, eyes vacant, red-shot, blood drooling from his lips.

His knife is stuck point-down in the dirt a few feet away from him. I yank it free and stalk toward him. His eyes follow me, listless, agonized.

I crouch beside him, gripping his hair in one hand and pressing the knife blade to his throat with the other. I wish I had some witty, biting thing to say to him, some sarcastic superhero one-liner.

But I don't. I'm exhausted, angry, and have no clue where Zirae brought me—or how.

There's a flash of light under Zirae, accompanied by the sharp, sour scent of rotting meat and coffee breath.

I drag the knife across his throat and hurl myself backward.

Too late.

He rolls to his side, even as my knife slices open his throat and his lifeblood sluices down his chest in a thick scarlet river. His hands, gnarled and arthritic and powerful, clamp around my wrists and hold on with vise-like, unbreakable strength.

His eyes blaze with hate even as he dies. "Break…this…World…Breaker."

Light flashes from his hands and his eyes blaze with greenish-white light. Searing heat—or is it brutal, biting cold?—eats through flesh and muscle and into bone, and my wrists grind with agony.

Zirae chokes with wet, gurgling laughter, flopping to his back—his bare feet scrabble at the hard earth. His back spasms. A pool of blood soaks into the thirsty ground, softening the hardpan.

He goes still.

I look down: circling both wrists are a pair of identical bracelets. Fashioned from some oily, tainted metal, gleaming with a sickly rainbow sheen like sunlight on spilled oil or rotting meat, they are slick and featureless. Each one is about the thickness of my thumb and heavier than it should be. There is no closure, no clasp.

"What the fuck?" I yank at them, one and then the other. "No! What the fuck is this? What the fuck did you do to me, Zirae?"

I summon prana—nothing.

A sick feeling swells up in my gut.

I look inside…but there's nothing to see because I can't look inside. I can't see my prana. I can't feel it. I'm not blocked from it—it's like it doesn't exist.

I look down: my blood armor is gone. I'm back in my street clothes—a pair of jeans, a forest-green V-neck T-shirt, and comfy, well-worn Vans.

My hair is still unnaturally white, but the glow is gone. My bondmark tattoos are there, too, but dull and lifeless—mere tattoos.

Caleb? Caspian? My thoughts echo in my head and go unanswered. Stirling? Alistair? Phineas?

"What did you do?" I whisper. I lurch to my feet and straddle Zirae, shaking him. "What the fuck did you do ?"

He flops lifelessly. His eyes stare vacantly at nothing. His skin is already cooling.

" FUCK !" I kick him as hard as I can.

His corpse should have flown halfway across the desert. Instead, my shoe sinks into his ribs, which crack—my toes throb in pain.

I hop away, screaming. After a moment, the worst of the ache fades—I wiggle my toes. Nothing is broken, but god that was dumb.

I suck in a deep breath and pace in circles around Zirae's corpse. "You absolute FUCK !" I whirl and scream the last word at him—the scream is so hard and crazed that my throat scrapes, hoarse.

No prana. No vampiric strength or speed. Nothing. I may as well be mortal. Maybe I am mortal.

Who knows where the fuck I am. Where do I go? What do I do?

I can't feel my mates—and that absence hurts worse than any physical pain. I realize—only now that I can't feel them—how much I relied on them, on feeling them in my spirit, in my mind. They're always there. Even the rest of my coven back in England, I felt them. I didn't have to talk to them every day to feel their spirits and be comforted by that.

Now…I'm empty. My mind, my spirit—my body. I'm empty. Utterly alone.

Mom? The thought echoes in my head.

"MOM!" I sag to my knees as the featureless wasteland absorbs my plea.

Above, the sky is a barren blue dome, and the sun is scorching and blinding. Around me—nothing but hardpan, cracks zigzagging madly in every direction. Heat waves shimmer.

What do I do?

Even alone under the mountain, I had a goal and something to fight for: freedom. Get my magic back. Get back to my mate and my coven. I had a path forward.

Now? I still need my magic back, and I still need to get to my mates…but how? I can't even sense my prana. Nor can I sense my vampire—the hunger, the bloodlust…it's gone.

I don't feel my mates—or the bond-sickness. I felt that immediately last time.

I yank on the bracelets again, to no avail. Zirae's knife! I grab it from the ground where I'd dropped it and saw at the metal with the blade—after several seconds of frantic sawing I check my progress: not so much as a scratch.

"Fuck," I mutter and throw the knife petulantly at Zirae's corpse.

I turn in circles, scanning the horizon in three hundred-and-sixty degrees for anything, any sign of…anything.

But there's nothing. Just heat haze and cracked earth.

Zirae's right arm is flung out wide, index finger pointing as if urging me to go that way.

So, I do the only logical thing: start walking in the opposite direction.