“Oh, I have a laundry list,” I said, evading the question. “But going through Tessa’s library is an adventure in disorganization. How did you know I was here?”
“You weren’t at your house or at the station, so I figured you’d be here.”
My car was in the garage, but he’d known I was here. When he called he hadn’t asked where I was; he said that he’d been knocking. He would never hurt me, I reminded myself, somewhat surprised at how certain I was of this. I turned and headed down the hall, hoping I wasn’t being hopelessly naïve. Just because I felt safe with him didn’t mean it was actually safe to be with him—either physically or emotionally.
“I’m finally able to get into her library,” I said over my shoulder, “so I figured I’d do as much research as I could.”
An awkward silence settled around us as I gathered my stuff up. It seemed like both of us wanted to pretend that the weirdness of yesterday hadn’t happened, which was fine with me, but now it felt like we were in a strange conversational limbo.
I cleared my throat, seeking to fill the void with any noise. “I never thanked you for coming to the funeral with me the other day. I’m … not sure I could have handled it alone.”
He shook his head, looking briefly haggard. “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.”
I shrugged, picking up the stack of books that I wanted to read more carefully. “So what are you up to now?” I wanted to ask him why he was here, why he’d wanted to track me down so badly, but I was a bit afraid of the answer. Or, rather, I wasn’t sure I was ready for the answer. Chickenshit.
“Oh, well …” I could see him hurriedly thinking of a response. “I was thinking of raising my cholesterol level at Lake o’ Lard and was wondering if you wanted to get something too. Part of my Kara-needs-to-eat plan.” He flashed a grin, but I could sense the faint edge to it.
I gave him the smile he was expecting. “Can we have a devil-dog-free meal this time?”
He laughed. “What, you didn’t like the entertainment?”
I suddenly didn’t want to play games anymore. I met his eyes. “Are you going to tell me why that thing attacked us?”
His smile faded. “I can’t … truly can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I challenged.
“Can’t. I promise! I honestly don’t know.”
I exhaled and nodded, but a knock out front stopped me from asking my next question, which would have been something on the order of How the fuck are you able to change memories?
“Hi, guys!” Jill’s perky voice chirped from the porch. Ryan stepped out into the hallway with me following, as Jill walked in through the open front door. “There’s a party and no one invited me?”
Ryan gave her a grin. “My God, what were we thinking?”
“Ryan thinks I’m too skinny,” I told her. “We’re going to forage for food. Wanna come?”
Her eyes flashed mischievously. “I don’t want to intrude on y’all’s date.”
“It’s not a date,” we both said simultaneously, then turned to scowl at each other. I looked hastily away, absurdly put out that he’d been so quick to deny the possibility that lunch with me could be considered a date. It was beside the point that I’d leaped to deny it as well.
Jill let out a snort. “Oooookay, I can see that now. Sure, I’m up for food.”
I set my stack of books down on the porch and dug in my pocket for the key, oddly conflicted that Jill would be joining us. There was still a strange tension between Ryan and me, and I couldn’t decide if having Jill there would get us past what had happened in the past couple of days or if I would continue to react like a jealous third-grader every time Ryan looked her way. How about if I stop being an insecure idiot? If he decides he likes her more than he likes me, then … more power to them. They’re both my friends. I can be a grown-up about this.
I just wished my stomach didn’t hurt at the thought.
I pulled the front door closed, then jumped at the sudden loud bang from inside the house. I slowly opened the door again. “That came from the library,” I said. I started to say that it was probably another book falling off a shelf, but an odd ripple of the arcane brushed me, sending a wave of goose bumps crawling along the back of my neck and reminding me unpleasantly of the encounter in the restaurant. I glanced back at Ryan, not surprised to see his gun in his hand. “You felt that?” I asked.
He nodded, brows lowered and gaze on the hallway. I looked back at Jill, with the intent to tell her to stay on the porch, but was shocked to see that she had her gun in her hand too and an utterly calm expression on her face.
“You felt it?”
She gave a small shake of her head. “No,” she whispered. “But I got your back anyway.”
I couldn’t help but grin, even as another bang sounded, this time accompanied by a harsh clatter and the sound of several objects striking the floor. I gave myself a mental smack. My gun was in my car, in the garage. I hadn’t expected to need it inside Tessa’s house. And the only way into the garage was either through the house—down the hallway that ran past the library—or with the garage-door opener. Which was in the car.
I scanned the hallway in search of anything that could be used as a weapon, but the only possible candidate was a flowered umbrella in the corner by the door. No way. But maybe I did have a weapon. I had the ability to shape arcane energy, right? And I’d once seen Rhyzkahl use potency as a weapon. Of course, that was in a dream, but dreams of Rhyzkahl had strong ties to reality. It was at least worth a try.
I took a deep breath and focused on pulling potency to me, concentrating, visualizing it flowing into my control. I cupped my hands before me, sensing scattered energies slowly coalescing, becoming visible as a quivering blue glow in my othersight.
Holy shit. I was doing it. I was controlling arcane power. I felt a triumphant laugh bubbling up.
Then the arcane glow sputtered out. I frowned at my cupped hands, my triumphant laugh dying out as thoroughly as the power.
“Um, Kara?” Ryan said. “What was that?”
Feeling like an idiot, I sighed and dropped my hands, then stepped over to the corner and hoisted the umbrella. “Let’s just say that I’m not going to be flinging arcane fireballs at anyone.”
I could see the deep amusement in his eyes, but thankfully he didn’t laugh outright. Good thing too, because I had an umbrella covered in giant pink flowers in my hand, and I wasn’t afraid to use it.
“You two are seriously weird,” Jill murmured.
“And yet you choose to hang out with us,” I countered, starting down the hall, holding the stupid umbrella like a sword. Ryan fell in beside me, covering the area with the mundane protection of his gun, while Jill hung back and covered our collective rears.
I cautiously peeked around the door to the library in time to catch a movement that was almost too fast to follow with human vision. Something small and rat-size zinged across the room from one shelf to behind a book on the opposite shelf. In fact, I probably would have suspected that it was a bird or squirrel, except for the fact that I could clearly see—even without shifting into othersight—a trail like arcane dust in the thing’s wake.
“I don’t think your gun’s going to be much good,” I said softly as I stepped inside the library, trying to track where the creature had gone.
“Yes, your umbrella will protect us all,” Ryan replied tartly, not holstering his gun. “What the hell is it? All I saw was a streak of light.”
“Dunno.” Maybe the umbrella would be more useful opened? Then I could use it as a shield. A very thin, wobbly shield. “I don’t know if it’s dangerous either, but it’s definitely something arcane.”
The thing came whizzing out from behind the book, straight at me. I yelped and swiped at it with the umbrella, missing it thoroughly and feeling like I was back in fifth grade softball. I’d sucked at sports back then, and I hadn’t improved in the intervening years. I got a better look at it this time, though, and caught a flash of teeth and wings in a tiny humanoid form. Like Tinker Bell on crack. But Tinker Bell never had such sharp teeth and sure as shit didn’t have a stinger coming out of her ass.
I heard the whiz of wings again and jammed the button on the handle of the umbrella, snapping it open just in time for the creature to glance off. It wobbled away, letting out a thin shriek that was high enough to be barely audible.
“Holy shit,” Jill breathed.
“Jill, stay back,” I warned. “I have no idea what this is or what it can do.” Or how it got in here, for that matter.
She made a grumbling noise but obligingly stepped back. I shifted fully into othersight, hoping to find where the little bugger had gone to, but I shifted right back out, scowling blackly. There was so much arcane energy scattered about the room from all the books and scrolls, it was like putting on night-vision goggles in broad daylight.
A nearly sub-audible thrum warned me in time to duck under the umbrella as it dove at me. I had a much clearer vision of a stinger aimed for me, but I didn’t even have a chance to swipe at it this time. I was far more concerned with not getting stung. I heard Ryan give a shout as he threw himself backward, into the hall.
I couldn’t let whatever it was escape out into the real world. It was obviously arcane, but I didn’t know if it was something native to this sphere or something that had been brought through from another. But I had a strong enough feeling that it was dangerous.
“You two guard the door!” I shouted. “Don’t let it out of the room.”
“Guard it with what?” Ryan shouted back. “My charming personality?”
“No, I don’t want to kill it just yet!”
Jill appeared in the doorway with an umbrella in each hand, holding them like a samurai with a pair of katana. She thrust one at Ryan. “Here, I found them in the hall closet. It’s been working for Kara.”
Ryan jammed his gun into his holster, muttering something that sounded vile as he took the umbrella. “Oh, sure. Give me the one with the purple ducks on it.”
Jill merely smiled and crouched, opening the umbrella. Hers was orange and yellow with a giraffe head on it. “You go high, I’ll cover low.”
Ryan opened his umbrella. “What are you going to do, Kara?”
“I need to trap this thing!”
“Fuck,” he growled. “And I suppose you have to be in there with it?”
Yes. Out there would have been preferable, but that wasn’t really an option. I quickly shoved a pile of books off the table, cringing as they landed in ugly heaps with the sound of tearing paper. I grabbed a pen off the floor and inscribed a quick and crude circle into the surface of the wooden table, still holding the umbrella over me. Tessa would be livid at the damage to her table, but I didn’t give a shit at this point. I’d refinish the damn thing later. I stepped back and began to slowly pull power again, but this time into the circle. I was going to try a dismissal, but since I didn’t have the faintest clue as to what this creature was and didn’t know its name, the standard dismissal that I used for demons wasn’t going to work. Instead, I was going to open a generic portal and try to keep it small enough so the arcane creature would get sucked through and returned to wherever it came from, but nothing else would.
There were only two things that could screw this up. First, if the thing was actually a resident of this sphere, I’d be spending arcane energy to make a portal for no reason at all. Second, if the thing had been summoned by another and was somehow bound to this sphere, I would need to do a far more specific dismissal.
I kept my attention divided as carefully as I could while I created my mini-portal, fighting to keep the power under control as it began to form and also paying attention to the shelf where I’d last seen the creature go. I’d never tried to create a portal of a specific size before, so I was going strictly on barely remembered theory. It also didn’t help that it was hard as shit to draw power when it was daytime during a waning moon. But I didn’t need a lot for what I was hoping to make.
Pain suddenly seared the middle of my back, and my control of the forming portal faltered badly as fatigue slammed into me. I fell to my knees and scrabbled at my back as I mentally grabbed for the portal. My fingers closed on something that wiggled and clawed alarmingly, sending a deep shock through me. A third way for this to fail: There’s more than one creature!
I’d maintained my hold on the portal though, which had widened to a bright slit in the universe a few inches wide. I chucked the squiggling thing in my hand at the portal, grimly pleased when it was drawn in with a sharp pop, like a roach into a vacuum. I could hear Ryan shouting something to Jill, but I couldn’t spare the focus to make it out. The pain had spiraled up, and the strange fatigue had increased to the point where it was taking everything I had just to maintain the portal. I heard a high-pitched whine from the shelf that I’d been watching, and then the other one shot out from behind the book. It grabbed on to the heavy chandelier, wrapping claws around a dangling crystal and resisting the pull of the portal as it bared its teeth at me. I knew that all I had to do was swat at it and it would fall into the vortex, but the pain in my back had increased to breath-stealing proportions, and even the thought of standing made my eyes water with the agony.
“Come here, ya little fucker!” I heard Jill cry out. I watched through pain-slitted eyes as she bounded into the room with a garbage bag in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a fierce grin as she snapped the creature up into her tongs and yanked it off the chandelier, crystal and all, then stuffed everything into the bag.
