My pulse hammered. My knees gave way and I hit the floor as the curse dug in, using my own fear to protect it. The world tilted and jerked as it adjusted its grip like a shark on a fish. The drums thundered. My heart beat in time with it. I didn’t have what it needed to invoke, but pulse by pulse, it swallowed me further.
Groaning, I felt my palms hit the tile floor. For one instant, the drums and the thundering beat of the curse were contrary. My breath came in with a gasp, and I caught a glimpse of sun and blue tile. With it came the realization that I was caught in a rhythm-based curse. If I could find one tiny bit of separation, I could wedge it off. I had to make my pulse erratic, out of sync with the drums.
Terrified, I held my breath and huddled on the tile. My knees pressed to my chest, and I closed my eyes. My pulse had matched the drums, and the curse grew stronger. Panic was a white-hot wash, and my lungs burned. I had to shift my pulse. It was my only chance.
Let . . . go, the curse demanded as sparkles flashed before me and my lungs burned. I. Would. Not. Breathe.
And then . . . my thudding heart stuttered again, missing a beat.
It was enough.
With a snap, the curse’s hold on me broke. I gasped as if coming up from the ocean depths, sucking in the air as if it was heaven itself. My pulse raced. The drums were counter to my body rhythm—and they couldn’t find it again. My hands pushed on the cold mosaic tile, weak as I lay there and breathed. My head hurt, and I wanted to throw up.
“Rachel!”
It was Trent, and I groaned as he sat me up. His hands were hot, burning almost. “Not so fast,” I whispered, eyes still closed.
“My God,” he said as he sat on the floor and held me. “You’re ice cold. What happened? I felt it all the way downstairs!”
Shivering, I managed to crack my eyelids. “Nothing,” I croaked. “I didn’t do anything. I was cleaning the table. It felt like—” I was hyperventilating, and I stopped breathing to try to slow it down. “Something attacked me,” I said, then took a deep breath. I couldn’t help it, and I fell against him, cold and nauseated. “It was aimed at me. It was aimed at me, but not me.”
He was silent, and realizing I wasn’t making any sense, I forced my eyes open. I’m on the floor, I thought, then lifted a hand to touch his shoulder. It took a lot of effort.
“I’m okay,” I said, but he wouldn’t let me get up. “It was a curse. It never fully invoked. The invocation element was missing. I didn’t have it.”
Okay, that didn’t make much sense either, but it was hard to explain. Who makes a curse that needs something from the victim to invoke? A highly complex, person-specific charm? But then why hadn’t it found what it needed?
“The invocation element was missing?” he echoed, and I bobbed my head.
“It searched my mind, and when it didn’t find it, it tried to invoke anyway. I managed to beat it off. I don’t think I could have stopped it if it had found what it wanted.”
Trent’s brow furrowed. “Okay,” he said, arms going all the way around me. “No more spelling today,” he added, and my stomach lurched as he lifted me.
“Trent, I’m fine,” I protested, but it was all I could do to put my arms around his neck and hold on. “I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything.”
“And you haven’t had anything to eat today but half a waffle and a handful of chips.”
I looked over his shoulder at the dishes by the fireplace. It hadn’t been a real sit-down lunch, but there’d been a lot of calories in it, and it hadn’t been that long ago. “I ate more than that!” I said, making a little wiggle. “If you felt it, then it wasn’t anything I did.”
“Right.” Huffing, he started for the hallway. “We’re done for today.”
“Trent. I’m fine. Put me down.” I stiffened. Feeling it, he hesitated at the top of the stairs, his jaw tightening before swinging me down.
My feet hit the floor, and I staggered, hand going behind my back to prop myself up on the rail without him seeing. I held my breath, pulse thundering as the world swam and steadied. Maybe that curse had taken something from me after all. But I knew it hadn’t. I had just needed everything I had to fight it off. Trent looked mad, his hand ready to catch me. I thought of the dwindling daylight, then my queasy feeling. I couldn’t spell like this and get any usable results.
“Maybe we should turn on the news,” I said meekly.
Immediately Trent’s irate expression eased, telling me how hard it had been for him to stand there and wait for me to come to the same conclusion he had. I couldn’t help a tiny little smile. He cared, not only that I was okay, but that I made my own decisions even if he felt they were the wrong ones.
“Why are you smiling?” he grumbled as he followed me down the stairs, hovering almost.
“Because I love you, too,” I said, and he chuckled, the last of his anger vanishing.
My balance shifted as I stepped down for the next step, and I froze, unable to move as a sudden uproar exploded in my mind. I cowered, hands over my head. It was the collective. Something had happened in the ever-after. Thoughts of revenge and joy were a slurry of contrasts. Trent’s hand touched me, and like a knob twisting the focus, it swamped me.
I woke up at the bottom of the stairs. My elbow hurt, and I stared up at Trent as he held my head to his chest. He looked scared. I was too.
“Trent, what’s going on?” I warbled, and his expression hardened.
“I don’t know.” His eyes looked deep into mine until he was sure I was okay. “I’m carrying you to the couch. Don’t try to stop me.”
Fear kept me silent. The memory of being helpless sifted to the topmost of my thoughts, scaring me even more as he lurched upright with me. I knew how to be passive. I knew how to be still to preserve my strength. That didn’t mean I liked doing it. This too will pass, I thought, pinning my fraying calm to it. Something had happened. I was okay. But it might happen again.
Trent set me gently into the cushions. It felt different from this morning, and I pulled my knees to my chin, making room for him as he pointed the remote and turned on the TV.
A sitcom blared out, the laugh track sounding trite. Trent began flipping through the channels. My tension wound tighter, fear growing as I put distance between myself and both the attack and the outcry from the demon collective. I couldn’t have been the only one who’d felt it.
Trent paused at a news station. The woman was professionally charming, and the man flirted harmlessly as they discussed the new school format being implemented. “Nothing on ICTV,” he said, arm extended to change the channel.
“Try the weather channel,” I said, eyes fixed on the screen.
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. “They don’t have to check the validity of their stories like the national news.”
Frowning, Trent looked at the back of the remote where Takata had taped a mini guide. “Okay. The weather channel.” Arm pointed, he clicked again.
“. . . strange phenomena in the sky observed over the Atlantic Ocean tonight,” an uncomfortable-looking woman on the beach was saying, the wind shifting her jacket even as her eyes kept darting to the surf. “Experts at the local marine study outpost are trying to link it to the sudden crab migration you see about me.”
She jerked, kicking at something outside of the camera’s lens. “The beaches are covered with the rarely seen but not uncommon tomato crab. Most mass migrations are tied to full moons and high or low tides, and it has local and international animal behaviorists stumped.”
And the woman standing there with them creeped out, I thought.
Trent’s arm lowered. “That’s . . . odd.”
My lip curled. Revenge and thoughts of punishment had searched my soul, tried to take me. There was usually a reason for the myths and symbols that dogged some animal species like flies, snakes, and . . . crabs. Crabs were the worst.
“The crabs are steadily moving inland,” the woman was saying, making an awkward jump as she almost stepped on something. “Apparently it’s happening up and down the coast as far north as Maine and as far south as lower Georgia.”
“Not Florida?” I wondered, stifling a shiver as Trent sat beside me.
“No one’s lived in Florida since the Turn. They probably haven’t checked yet.”
The newscaster handed it off to the station, which had somehow gotten an interview with a local marine biologist. “See what Inderland Entertainment Tonight is saying,” I asked, knowing their programming wouldn’t have to be cleared or verified either.
Trent turned the remote over to find the channel number. “IET isn’t on until six.”
“It’s six in Cincinnati,” I said, and he grunted, hesitated in thought, frowned, and clicked the right number. Yeah, I didn’t like that the sun was down on the East Coast either. Whatever was happening there would probably hit us in three hours.
“Inderland Entertainment Tonight,” he said, eyes fixed forward. “What do you think they will know that CNN doesn’t?”
“CNN is an hour late in breaking anything new,” I said, listening to the trendy, size 1 woman in six-inch zebra heels interviewing a beatnik college kid with wide eyes and too many friends in the background trying to get on TV. “Ghosts?” I said, turning to Trent. “Are they talking about ghosts?”
“I think we should try CNN,” he suggested.
“No, wait!” I said, grabbing for the remote, but he was too fast, jerking it away. “Go back!” I demanded, breathless until he did.
“He like came right at me!” the kid was saying. “Creepy as shit and ragged. I thought it was a joke until it grabbed me. I tried to get it off me, but I sort of went through it a little. My friends pulled it off me, and we got the hell out of there. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t even real except where it grabbed me!”
“It was a surface demon,” I said, pulse quickening.
Trent’s wandering attention snapped back. “No.”
But the skinny woman was talking, a still shot of an underground train platform behind her. “Reports of similar incidents have been coming in from all over Manhattan,” she said, and I wondered if she was going to change to more sinister makeup before the night was over. Maybe put a bat in her hair. “The first indications that this is a belowground-only assault seem untrue as the wraiths are beginning to venture above on the streets, causing havoc.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to grasp the concept of polite society when you’ve been out of it for a hundred years,” I said, grimacing as a blurry, shaky shot clearly taken from a phone showed a surface demon hissing at a car before diving behind the stone wall at Central Park.
“Those are surface demons!” Trent blurted out, sounding almost betrayed.
Great. Just great. Depressed, I unkinked my hands from around my knees and put my feet on the floor. “Damn it, Trent,” I complained. “I never would have played dead if I had thought they could actually do it!”
“But they can’t!” Trent’s gaze was fixed on the TV, his shock obvious.
Tired, I rubbed my forehead. “Maybe that’s what I felt. What we both felt,” I added, even though he hadn’t said anything about an elf-born curse ripping through his soul.
He jerked straight, and I could almost see the thoughts aligning. “I didn’t feel an attack. I felt a call to arms.” Hand rubbing over his face, he leaned back into the cushions, his brow lowering and his expression getting darker.
Subdued, I took the remote and set it on the table before it fell between the cushions. Elven magic had attacked me. It had passed over him and struck me—even if it hadn’t found what it needed to fully invoke. I had a bad feeling that whatever it had been, it had been aimed at the demons, not just the surface demons.
“You’re a demon,” Trent said softly, and I nodded, taking his hand in mine. “You’re in the collective.”
I’d felt an outcry, one so violent and explosive it had reached me even without a scrying mirror, knocking me flat on my ass. Depressed, I watched a group of people on a bus try to catch a surface demon only to have to beat it off a woman when it turned the tables on them.
“How did they manage it?” Trent said, distraught. “It can’t be done.”
But they did it. “Try the regular news now,” I said, and Trent let go of my hand to stretch for the remote.
“. . . new phenomena of what spellogists are calling a spontaneous release of surface demons from the ever-after. Elven Sa’hans are telling us these are actually the material manifestation of the souls of the undead and to leave them alone as they search for their bodies.”
Trent grimaced. “They are not Sa’hans. They’re frauds.”
Frauds or not, they’d managed to get the surface demons into reality. I was starting to think again, and my shoulders scrunched up almost to my ears. Something had happened in the ever-after, something bad. Uneasy, I looked over my shoulder to my mom’s unseen spelling room. I’d been through most of the cupboards, and there’d been no scrying mirror. I could probably summon Al without it, but he was pissed at me.
Unless he’s trapped somewhere. He won’t kill me if I rescue him, will he?
“The ghostly, frightening images with half substance are showing up in most major East Coast cities,” the newscaster was saying, “the vampiric souls appearing in a steady progression west with the setting sun.”
Trent crossed one ankle over his knee. I’d never seen him look so confused. “I don’t get it,” he said, gesturing. “There isn’t a way to move them to reality.”