Chapter 9

I landedface down on a cold, dirt-covered stone floor. The pain of the impact registered only in a distant way.

I was bloody, bruised, and too disoriented to process more than three basic facts: I was alive, I still had my backpack and arm cuffs, and I was terribly sick.

I hadn't eaten before the trip for just this reason, but my stomach decided to rid itself violently of every last bit of contents anyway. When that misery was over, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and crawled away.

To get my bearings, I leaned against a stone wall and waited for the nausea and dizziness to subside. After my eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, it took several seconds for my surroundings to make sense.

"Oh, shit," I breathed.

When traveling by mirror to another world without a corresponding mirror on the other end, a traveler emerged at their destination in the same place as the mirror they used. That meant I'd come out in the Broken World in what should have been their version of sub-level one of the headquarters of the Vampire Court of the Western United States.

And maybe it had been, fifty or a hundred years ago. Instead of walls and a ceiling carved with spellwork, I saw collapsed stone, no ceiling at all, and far above, a starry night sky in place of the manor's famous soaring rotunda. I'd landed not in an elegant mansion, but in the basement of an abandoned building.

In this world, Northbourne was a crumbling ruin. If I hadn't been so sick and hurting, I would have smiled.

The building wasn't the only immediately noticeable difference between this world and my own. Waves of natural magic rose and fell around me like swells in the ocean. I recognized earth and air magic, but to my surprise, they felt distinctly unlike my own. The little amount of water magic I had because of my connection to Malcolm told me the water magic here was different too.

The magic here wasn't just different; it was far more powerful, as if I were standing right on top of or conducting power from a ley line. That matched what Adam had told me, but hearing magic was more potent and experiencing it were two very different things.

I suddenly worried whether I would be able to use my magic here. As an experiment, I raised my hand and tried to create cold fire on my fingers with earth magic. Instead of the small green flames I expected, cold fire shot out with tremendous force, as if my fingertips were flamethrowers. If anything had been within fifteen feet of me at that moment, I would have incinerated it.

"Shit!" I tried to extinguish the fire. "Shit, shit, shit," I chanted as I struggled to rein in my own magic—something I hadn't had trouble doing since the age of five.

When the fire finally vanished, I took off my backpack and got to my feet. I ached like I'd fallen down the side of a mountain and hit every rock on the way to the bottom. Most of my injuries were minor except for the slashes on my shoulder and left thigh.

Now that I had my feet under me—both literally and metaphorically—I reached for the magic in the buzzing crystal in my arm cuff. "Release."

Malcolm appeared. "Hey, Alice. Told you we'd make it. Jeez, you look like ten miles of bad road."

When I didn't respond, he frowned. "Why are you staring at me? Do I have something in my teeth?" He looked down at himself. His eyes widened. "Holy crap!"

I swallowed. "Yeah—holy crap." I poked him with my index finger. Normally, my hand went through him, and he felt like thick fog. Instead, my fingertip hit something solid. "You feel almost real."

He rolled his eyes. "I am real, Alice."

"You know what I mean. How do you feel?"

He started to float toward me, then paused. Carefully, he took a step forward, and then another. "Like I'm real," he said in disbelief. "Alice, I'm real here!"

I didn't point out that he'd just mocked me for saying the same thing not ten seconds ago. "You're almost solid and the magic here is completely different. So far, this is more like the Weird World than the Broken World."

Malcolm looked up from marveling at his own hands and gestured at our surroundings. "I dunno—Northbourne looks pretty broken to me. What do you think happened?"

"I have no idea, but this place has been abandoned for a long time. You good?"

"Better than good. Better than you. Looks like something tried to shred you."

"As I predicted, it was a bumpy ride." I unzipped my backpack, rummaged around, and took out a black velvet bag and a rolled-up cloth. "Time for a tracking spell. Let's see where Mariela and that scroll are. Hopefully they're relatively close by and not somewhere in Europe. Keep an eye out, will you?"

"It's pretty quiet. What am I watching for?"

"I don't know. Anything weird, I guess."

I unrolled the cloth and spread it out on the stone floor. To save time, I'd drawn the spellwork for the tracking spell on the cloth before I left. The cloth smelled like my home—and like Sean, who'd helped me cut the fabric and rolled it up for me when the spellwork was complete.

He'd hung out with me in the basement all afternoon, sitting on my work table while I decided what to bring, what to leave behind, and what I needed to prep ahead of the journey. We'd talked about a lot of things, most of them inconsequential, like movies we wanted to watch when I got back and painting a few rooms in the new house before moving in. Making plans for the future helped us both avoid thinking about the possibility I wouldn't make it back.

I reached inside my jacket and wrapped my fist around my wolf amulet. I breathed in the parchment scent of Carly's magic and smiled at the warm golden magic of Sean's shifter trace. The sensations were bittersweet.

Sean would have sensed the moment I went through the mirror. I pictured him at home, sitting in the living room with a glass of whisky, or maybe lying in bed, when our connection vanished and he knew I was gone. It must have felt like a punch right in the gut, even though he'd known it was coming. My own stomach contracted thinking about the pain it would have caused him.

I should have told him where we were going, Valas and the entire Vampire Court be damned.

I tucked the amulet back under my shirt so it nestled reassuringly between my breasts and got back to work. From the velvet bag, I took a piece of obsidian and placed it in the center of the spellwork on the cloth.

"That's the darkest magic I've ever sensed that wasn't straight-up black magic," Malcolm said, eyeing the stone. "The trace is strong. The stone must have been soaking up the scroll's magic for a long time. Good thinking on Valas's part to keep a stone with the scroll so if it ever went missing, we had some of its magic for a tracking spell."

"Yeah, yay for Valas." My voice was bitter. "She thinks of everything, all right."

Malcolm crouched beside me. His new almost-human physical presence was going to take some getting used to. "Is there anything you need to tell me?"

Best to just say it and get it over with. "As I was stepping through the mirror, Valas told me if we don't bring the scroll back, we aren't coming back at all. The mirror will be locked to us without it."

He stared at me, aghast. "That wasn't the deal you made!"

"No, it wasn't, which was why she waited until I couldn't turn back to tell me." I took off my jacket, wincing at the sizzle of pain in my injured shoulder. "We're stuck here until we get that scroll from Mariela."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know yet."

He whistled low. "When Sean finds out, he'll kill her."

"He might not get a chance." I removed my shirt and used a couple of wet wipes to clean off the travel spellwork. I started to burn the wipes, then remembered the accidental flamethrower and thought better of it. Instead, I put them in a plastic bag and stuffed it into the backpack. "First things first: we have to find Mariela and the scroll."

"How are you so calm?" Malcolm demanded. "Valas tricked us. If we don't find the scroll, we're trapped here forever."

"I have to be calm, Malcolm." My vision went red around the edges. Dark magic swirled between us. "If I let my anger get the better of me, I think the results would be very bad."

He put his hand on my arm. I'd never felt his touch before, not like this. We'd been friends—siblings, almost—for months, and this was the first time we'd made real physical contact.

I was angry at Valas. So very, very angry. Burn-down-the-world angry. But when Malcolm touched my arm, my anger morphed into something that might be useful—something I could control.

Malcolm appeared shaken. "Wow, I didn't realize how much I'd missed human contact until this moment." He squeezed my arm. "Hi. You feel really warm." He gave me an almost-boyish grin that made my heart ache.

I pictured him as a young man, long before Darius Bell's cabal got its hooks in him, when he was a chemistry major looking forward to a career as a researcher. Before he'd been tortured to death by a blood mage and ended up as a ghost because Bell had wanted him bound to a powerful mage, and before angels had decided I needed a companion and protector. He hadn't had much control over any aspect of his life—or death—for a very long time. I knew from personal experience exactly how much that sucked. And he hadn't been able to touch anyone for comfort.

Before I knew what I was doing, I hugged him. He was cold, but I didn't care.

He hugged me back. When we let go, his smile was a little crooked. "I warned you last night not to get sappy on me," he reminded me. "All this lovey-dovey huggy stuff…I kinda miss the angry, rude Alice I used to know."

I surreptitiously wiped my eyes and sat cross-legged in the center of the tracking spell with the obsidian rock in front of me. "Really?"

"You're all soft and squishy now. Hard to believe you're the same person who threatened to have me exorcised."

"Yeah, well, call me squishy again and see what happens." I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth.

When my mind was clear, I picked up the stone and drew on the trace of the scroll's magic it contained. The tracking spell on the cloth shimmered on the edge of my senses, waiting to be unleashed.

I inhaled, exhaled, and grabbed the tracking spell with my mind. "Adinvenire."

Magic flared. The spell should have shown me a vision of where the scroll was. Instead, a blast of power sent me flying as the tracking spell splintered. One moment I was sitting in the middle of the cloth I'd brought, and the next I was crumpled against the wall on the far side of the room, with my ears ringing and nose filled with the smell of smoke and dark magic. My chest hurt like I'd been kicked by a mule.

For a moment, I thought Valas had somehow booby-trapped the magic in the stone, though that didn't make a hell of a lot of sense if she needed that scroll found. What did make sense was my magic, or even the spellwork I knew, wasn't going to work here in the Broken World—at least, not like it did back home. The tracking spell had failed and released its energy the only way it could. I was lucky I hadn't been knocked out—or worse.

"Alice!" Malcolm shook my shoulder. I'd already forgotten he could do that now. "Wake up! Your wolf's out!"

My eyes snapped open.

My wolf stood about ten feet away, in what I was starting to think of as her furry, real-wolf form. She must have jumped out of me when the spellwork fractured. Like Malcolm, she looked pretty damn solid. No wonder my chest hurt.

She sniffed the ground and air, then bared her teeth and growled.

"I know it smells weird." I sat up with a groan. Everything that didn't already hurt from the journey now ached from hitting the wall. "You can't be running around on your own here. We're strangers in a strange land. You need to go back where you were."

She growled again and resumed sniffing her way around the room. Blast it—the last thing I needed right now was a stubborn wolf refusing to return to my body.

Malcolm watched both of us nervously as I staggered to my feet and leaned against the wall. Nothing was broken, I decided after checking my arms and legs, but I would be completely black-and-blue by morning. I missed Sean's soaker tub so much in that moment I almost cried.

The cloth with the tracking spell was gone, blown to smithereens by the blast, which had also scoured the stone floor clean of all dirt and debris. The obsidian stone had probably met the same fate, or was permanently lost in the ruins around us.

I rubbed my face. "Son of a bitch. Without the stone, and without a tracking spell, how are we supposed to find the scroll? Mariela's got a massive head start on us. She could be anywhere."

"We'll have to study the magic here and develop a new tracking spell, or find one we can use. You've still got the bag the stone was in. It'll have some trace—for a while, at least." Malcolm frowned. "Hey, what's she doing?"

My wolf disappeared into the shadows on the far side of the room.

"Hey! Come back!" I dug a small flashlight out of my backpack and hurried after her, muttering curses at the pain in my left knee. "Damn it, I'm going to have to put her on a leash."

Malcolm snorted. "Good luck with that."

From somewhere in the darkness, my wolf snarled, seemingly in agreement.

I pushed the button on the flashlight, but nothing happened. Apparently mirror travel drained batteries too. I tucked the dead flashlight in my back pocket.

Two golden eyes appeared in the darkness. "Seriously, you can't just run off like this," I told my wolf as she emerged. "This place is weird and dangerous."

My wolf eyed me, as if to say, Yes, but I'm weird and dangerous too. She opened her mouth and dropped a small obsidian rock at my feet.

Malcolm blinked. "Wow—she fetches? Um, good wolf," he added.

My wolf showed her teeth.

I picked up the stone. Enough of the magic trace from the scroll remained that we could try another spell, if we found one that would work here. "Thank you," I said.

My wolf turned and headed for a pile of collapsed stone. She climbed the rocks, picking her way carefully up toward ground level.

"Hey, wait," I protested.

She ignored me.

"Damn it." I stuck the obsidian in my front pocket and hurried to put on my shirt and jacket.

While Malcolm floated up ahead to make sure nothing waited for us topside, I took a moment to settle the backpack on my shoulders and check on the portal I'd emerged from into the Broken World.

Our return gate was a distinctly familiar sensation on my skin—an echo of my own magic and the magic of home. The portal was only visible in my Second Sight, and only from an angle. I thought it unlikely anyone would find it, even if they were looking. Judging by the state of the building, I doubted people came here. Maybe Vamp HQ was simply in a different location—or maybe there was no Vampire Court in this world. Adam had said there were vampires, but we knew nothing of how they were organized, if at all.

As an experiment, I tried to push against the shimmery magic, but it snapped at my fingers with an angry crackle. I yanked my hands away. "Son of a bitch," I hissed. "She locked it, all right." Not that I'd thought Valas was bluffing about not allowing us to return without the scroll, but the grim reality of our situation was sinking in. It was not a good feeling.

Nothing else to do but start our search for Mariela. I buckled the straps of my backpack across my chest and climbed up out of the basement, following the same path my wolf had used along the fallen stones that had once been part of the manor. Whether on purpose or accident, she seemed to have found the path that would be easiest for me to climb, even with a sore knee and wounds to my shoulder and leg.

At ground level, I stopped to take in the sight of the ruins of Northbourne from the center of what remained of the lobby. So much of it was familiar, from the marble floor to the sweeping grand staircase and the second-floor gallery, but all were crumbling and overgrown. Chunks of the rotunda had landed in the lobby and smashed through the floor, demolishing the rooms below.

Malcolm's voice startled me. "This is eerie. I don't even have skin, but I've got goosebumps."

I rubbed my own prickly flesh. "Yeah." I spotted my wolf heading into the woods through a wide opening where the massive double doors had once been. "Wait for us!"

I picked my way carefully across the ruined lobby, worried what was left of the floor would give way under my feet. We emerged from the building to find ourselves looking not at Northbourne's sweeping circular drive and beautiful grounds, but thick, dense forest. What remained of the driveway was barely visible in the undergrowth.

"Don't say we're not in Kansas anymore," I told Malcolm as we surveyed our surroundings.

"Okay, I won't, but we are totally not in Kansas anymore." Malcolm shook his head. "This is trippy."

My wolf had already made it down the crumbling front steps and headed into the forest. "Where are you going?" I asked her, hurrying to catch up.

She turned and growled impatiently, as if the answer should have been obvious.

When I reached her, she nudged my hip twice with her nose, then turned and faced the woods.

I touched my hip where she'd bumped me and found the obsidian stone in my pocket. "Holy moly," I breathed. "She's tracking the scroll using the magic in the stone."

I dug the obsidian from my pocket and held it out. My wolf nudged my hand hard and headed into the trees.

"What do we do?" Malcolm asked as we followed her. "I don't know much about this world, but I doubt we can just run around with a wolf like she's your pet. Things are crazy here, but surely they're not that crazy."

"I don't know what to do except follow her for now." I pushed a branch out of the way. "We'll just have to deal with whatever problems we run into when we run into them. One thing I do know is I have no idea if I can force her to return to my body if she refuses, or what she'll do if I try."

"So, to recap: our magic doesn't work right, our spells don't work at all, and your wolf can track the scroll but she's committed to doing her own thing," Malcolm said, his voice drier than the Sahara. "We're off to a great start in the Broken World."

"Pretty much."

Magic surged. Ahead of us, my wolf froze in her tracks, raised her head, and howled.

Malcolm jerked and turned toward me. "Oh, shit, Alice—"

Power erupted from the earth like a volcano, and everything around us disappeared in a blaze of magic.