Enchanter's Echo (34 page)

She strode to the door before she could change her mind, but Bull stopped in her path. He wrapped her in his meaty arms, pulling her hard against him. He put his head on hers. “Drenched with faith, Ror.” His voice was tight. “This is your fight.”

She nodded at the comfort of his familiar pep talk.

His chest rose with a slow deep breath. “But this time, all you have to do is stay on your feet until he wakes up.”

She stepped back and looked up at him. Her fear that Edmund wouldn’t come must have showed in her eyes.

“Drenched with faith,” he whispered.

“Promise me you’ll get away if you can.”

“Nah.” He pointed at Edmund. “He’s my fight.” Bull was the one who’d have to convince Edmund that he wasn’t contaminated, that he wasn’t unnatural.

She tried to laugh. “You’ve got the harder fight. Facing the army will be a cinch compared to that.”

He gave an arrogant shrug. “I’m undefeated.”

She patted him on the chest and stepped passed.

Merida hugged her tight as she walked by. “May the goddess shine on your path, Aurora Firenze.”

She’d need more than a well-lit path.

She stepped out the door. Cold air nipped her cheeks. The junkyard was silent and still, but activity abounded on the other side of the shield. Military mages lined the entire length of it as far as she could see. They were armed with every weapon imaginable and many she had not.

She walked a dozen paces from her shop’s front door to the shield’s edge. The force wavered beneath her hand then became more solid, as if it wanted to keep her in. She couldn’t afford that option. She pushed the toe of her boot into it, then her leg, her body. Her shoulder was next, and then the side of her face. For a moment she thought she’d be trapped, but her fingertips registered cold air on the other side. The barricade abruptly threw her out. She landed on all fours, panting as if she’d had no air for minutes instead of seconds. The shield had stolen the rest of her energy, the bit she had left after helping Edmund.

A long line of warriors closed in on her, pointing mage guns at her. Edmund’s brother led the way.

She clamored to her feet, the world spinning and fading in random patterns. She made sure to hold her hands at her chest, palms facing in. General Rallis stopped inches from her and gripped her arm with a hard, gloved hand. “Aurora Aster Firenze, by order of the senator of Rallis Territory you are under arrest for the murder of Lord Edmund Rallis.”

“What?” she gasped.

A man in a long gray robe pushed his way through, his fierceness equal to the warrior mages, though he didn’t wear their costume. Aurora recognized the robe from her time at the portal and the boat. He was a guard from the High Councilor.

“General, by order of the High Councilor’s office, I hereby call for the immediate extermination of the enchantress Aurora Firenze.”

Edmund’s brother looked the man up and down. His nose flared. “I got here first, Dawson.”

A hard anger crossed the face of the guard. “See that she dies or you’ll be hearing from my mistress.”

“Wait,” Aurora protested. “You don’t understand.”

Edmund’s brother pulled her arms back, squeezing her wrists with handcuffs. He handed her over to another mage, one with a dark goatee and mustache, who marched her by the elbow toward the waiting vehicles.

And then she made a mistake. She reached for the life of the metal, buried beneath the thick restraining spells of the handcuffs. Searching for the metal’s original vibes was like reaching to the core of the earth. She barely had the strength. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead as she got it. She lifted the metal’s vibes through the spells, neutralizing them. The handcuffs clattered to the ground.

“Impressive, enchantress,” the devil man said.

Everything went black.

She awoke to daylight streaming in through three dormer windows. Four metal beds stretched out to her left, all without sheets, just as hers was. Crisp air touched her bare arms and legs. She looked down at her torso. A dull beige dress covered her to her lower thighs, thin and plenty used. It sure as starry night wasn’t her dress.

Her mouth went dry. Where were her clothes? She shivered at the violation.

She sat up and swung her feet toward the ground, but her legs wouldn’t move. She reached for them, but her arms caught as well. Nothing visible wrapped around her, yet something was tied to her ankles and her wrists. She pulled at the restraints, searching for weaknesses, for anything that would tell her how she was bound. What kind of spell was this?

“Do you not remember?”

She craned her head to see Edmund’s brother standing in the corner. The goateed man waited beside him. Their sharp stares pierced her. She lowered her chin, gazing at them from the corner of her eye. Her energy puffed through the air.

The general brushed at it as if it bothered him.

“Remember what?” Her voice was hoarse.

“The restraints. You woke up. Finally. Then you tried to escape.” Icy cold bit through the general’s tone. “My captain spelled you in with a chant. You can’t undo it since there are no remnants of life energy available in a chant. Not like rope or handcuffs. Though I wouldn’t have thought an enchantress could vibe metal so effectively. I thought your kind was all about life energy. How does that work?”

Fear squeezed her with a familiar touch. She was so weary of its sharp embrace. After months of secrets, then the terror of seeing Edmund fall, of watching him lose his heart, surely by now fear had scarred her from the inside out with its razor edge. But this was her fight. Edmund was safe. It was her job to deal with these people and keep him that way. “Metal has the life energy of the stars...of the universe.” Her voice shook.

He strode to the cot beside her and sat down. His stare burned through her, blue eyes so cold they couldn’t possibly ever warm. Not like Edmund’s at all. The grim line of his mouth, the flare of his nostrils…hard. It was the only word to describe him.

“Where are my clothes?” The question fell out of her mouth unbidden.

“You shouldn’t have messed with the spells on the cuffs. I’ve never known anyone who could.” He added the last part as an aside. “It means you don’t get to keep any metal. Not your zippers, not your earrings, not the buttons on your jeans. Not the clasps on your bra. Plus, your clothes were covered in the blood of a Rallis. We can’t let that get out. They’ve been destroyed.”

Goddess, who had undressed her?

“I need the spells down around the junkyard.” His voice was harsh, demanding.

She looked away. “I can’t. They’re not my spells.”

“We can destroy it, but it will take a fuck load of energy. Enough that the vibe sewers will overflow. They weren’t meant to hold that much. Therefore, because we don’t have air access to the towers, destroying the shields will contaminate the land around it for about a month according to our experts. The most powerful mages in the neighborhood will get the sickest. Some may die. Depends on how powerful they are and how much energy it truly takes.”

He slouched, tipping his head, reaching for her gaze with his own. “You don’t want that, do you? You want your Drainpipe friends to stay safe and healthy. I want the shields down. The office of the High Councilor, on the other hand, wants you dead. The apprentice has called multiple times ordering your death for the murder of Rallis’s heir.”

Her throat went dry. “He’s not dead.”

“He was shot in the heart by a spelled crossbow that has your fingerprints on it….”

“No,” she breathed.

“It was laying next to where your car was parked.”

“I didn’t shoot him. I can’t…I can’t do things like that. Not that I want to!” She strained forward with her words, but the restraints caught her. “I...love him.” But the odds were that he hated her now. “Oh, goddess, how did this happen?”

“Please tell us. What did happen?” The dark circles under his eyes told tales of his sleepless nights and worry. “Not only does the weapon have a female’s energy on it, you ran from the scene, taking my brother’s body with you.”

“I needed to get him to the healer.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“No!” she cried.

He looked up at the goateed man.

“Truth,” the man said.

“Who shot him then?” the general asked her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone.” Her voice faded.

The goateed man sauntered over. “General Rallis, if you’d let me take her to the basement, I’ll kick Wasten out of the chair, put her in it, and get the information out of her. May I?” He cracked his knuckles.

“You found the overseer?” she asked.

The general didn’t respond to either of their questions. “The only reason you aren’t already in the basement is because Captain Whitman insists you couldn’t kill my brother.”

She could imagine what was in the basement...a plethora of sharp, cutting instruments sized to fit the hand of her volunteer torturer.

“I can’t sense Edmund’s vibes.” The general lifted a hand to his heart. “My brother is gone.”

“He’s alive,” she whispered.

The goateed man shrugged and looked away. “Truth.” He didn’t want to admit it.

The grief did not disappear from the general’s face. He didn’t believe her. She wanted to reassure him, to tell him his brother was going to fine, but in the general’s eyes, Edmund would never be fine.

“Let me tell you something else you might not know,” the general continued, “when you did your little handcuff trick, Dane, here, shut you down. Only you didn’t wake up. You’ve been here for three days. We were concerned that if we forced you to wake up, you’d die from the power. We need you alive. At least temporarily. You had three more hours and then we were going to risk it. Because while you were sleeping, someone tore another fissure in the bond.” The words snapped out. “This one is draining power so quickly that the territory is running out of time. Every mage bonded to Rallis can feel it.

“I need you to fix it. I want those shields down. I want Edmund.” He listed his demands one by one.

“They’re his shields. I can’t turn them off, and I can’t get back in. If he hasn’t brought them down, then it’s not safe to do so.” If the shields were still up, he either wasn’t awake or wasn’t strong enough yet. Either way, it meant he wasn’t yet able to defend himself or her people. But goddess, three days?

“Who’s the danger?”

“You.” Her voice wobbled. “Everyone.”

“I would never hurt my brother.”

“Neither would I,” she whispered.

Captain Whitman appeared in the doorway. “Thank the goddess she’s awake.” His hard tone was at odds with his handsome face. He gave a long hum, punctuated by a steady rhythm. Her bonds unwound. She twisted her feet to the floor instantly.

She hadn’t realized he was a cadence mage. They chanted their spells in a language unique to them. Chanting spells was slower, but their casts were impossibly strong and invisible to mage sight.

He stared down at the general, his arms crossed over his chest. “When the heir finds out about this, he’s gonna kill us.”

“Yeah, well, the state of the territory is at stake.” The general leaned forward on his knees, fingers touching in a pyramid, lines creasing his exhausted face. “Plus my brother’s wellbeing.”

“Yeah, well,”—he dared to mock the general—”if I recall, not too long ago, the safety of the Republic’s mages was at stake. In fact, over three hundred of them had already died because of a bunch of terrorists we couldn’t catch, and Bronte was in the basement. Barefoot. You were so damn pissed at me for putting her in that chair you almost killed me. And no one had stripped Bronte of her clothes. Or shut her down so hard she didn’t wake for three days.” The captain shot a dirty look at Dane.

“Hey, I barely touched her. I think she was sick or something!” The other man defended himself.

“Even worse! Goddess, we all fucking know enchantresses can’t hurt people.”

“How do we know that?” Dane crossed his arms.

“It’s in poems and sonnets from the ancient Greeks to our own time!”

“Why, how could we ever refute such hard evidence?”

Gregor scoffed at the torturer’s sarcasm.

“Where’ve you been anyway?” the bearded man asked.

“Walking the perimeter. The vibes around the farm are off somehow.”

“Of course, they’re off. We torture people for a living around here. I’m damn sick of your woo woo stuff,” Dane sneered.

Captain Whitman turned back to the general. “While I was patrolling, I had an interesting chant session with Major Fisher.”

“I cannot believe that man transferred here,” Dane growled. “Now we have two monkers.”

Captain Whitman bristled at the insulting term for cadence mages. “What’s your problem, Dane?”

The general took a deep breath. “It’s the fissure. It’s effecting some worse than others.”

Whitman gave Dane a hard stare and then shifted his gaze to the general. “The major is at the junkyard. He says no one there can get any comm spells through to the farm at all. Not the landline either. Nothing.”

General Rallis shook his head. “We’re getting calls from the High Council’s apprentice.”

“She’s a chatty girl,” Dane piped in.

The captain frowned. “According to the major, Bronte tried to call you. But she couldn’t get through either, even with your calling card charms. Something is blocking communications.”

“What is Bronte doing at the junkyard?” The general’s question echoed through the room.

“She accompanied the senator on his mission to find the fissure. He thinks it’s in the Drainpipe. He couldn’t narrow it down any further, but Bronte could sense the mark’s energy and she followed it to the forest’s edge outside the shields.”

The general stood, radiating fury. “Where is Bronte now?”

Captain Whitman didn’t seem intimidated at all. “On her way home, but Vin, the senator is very ill.”

The general glared down at her. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You and I—”

“And me,” Dane butted in. “And all the other members of my unit. So don’t try anything.”

The general’s glare tightened at the interruption. “We’re all going back to the shield. I’m guessing my brother will let you in…if he’s still alive.”