another. Head up, she stared at the men ringing us. At the bridge, the woman finally got out of the water, dripping and bleeding from scratches and with a malevolent gleam in her eye. Five now.
I sucked in the line energy, feeling it hiccup and stutter. Does Al know I’m using his line? I wondered, feeling Al’s utter abandonment of me again—jealousy, heartache, and hatred too much for him to forgive.
“Let me go, Ivy. I have to fight,” I whispered, and after the briefest of hesitations, she did, her eyes closing as she uncrimped her fingers from around my arm. I could tell it had taken all her resolve, and she swallowed her saliva back, refusing to give in to her instincts—but instincts die last and hard.
“I like it when you say my name,” she said as her eyes opened. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Shit. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. “I’m glad,” I whispered, wishing my knees weren’t shaking. “I’m going to have to kick some ass. Can you get to the statue on your own? Maybe critique me when it’s over?”
“Over a beer,” she said. Her hand wasn’t so tight against her middle. I didn’t know a charm for this. I had nothing.
Ivy slowly lost her balance and leaned into me again, unable to stand on her own. She wasn’t going to make it, no matter what happened, and I shoved my panic down deep. “Thank you, Jenks,” I whispered.
His wings clattered, and he wouldn’t look at me, that same black dust sifting from him and making my skin tingle. I held Ivy close, the chill of her pressing into me as her head hung down and her breathing grew shallow. She was close to passing out. Slowly I lifted my chin and found the eyes of the waiting vampire.
“You first,” I said, yanking a wad of ever-after into me. My breath came in with a sharp sound. Ivy stiffened in my grip, and I wondered if she felt it as I pulled everything I could handle into me. “Jenks, grab something!” I shouted as the building energy crested, lapped the top of my abilities, and, with a spasm that seemed to shake me to my core, edged into pain as I took even more. I had to take it all. All.
“Rache!” Jenks shrilled, tugging on my hair as he wound himself up in it. “What are you doing?”
I had one shot, and I wasn’t going to waste it, even if it burned my synapses to a twisted mass. “Corrumpto!” I shouted, letting the energy explode from me.
My knees buckled. I felt airy, light and unreal. The line hummed through me, smelling of ozone and stardust. A soundless wave sped out, flattening the grass and bowling the vampires head over heels, making them look like crows. Ivy shuddered, her eyes opening black and deep. Together we straightened as a distant bell rang, and then another. Across the river, the basilica’s bells tolled, and tears threatened when I recognized my own church bells ringing an echo from the force of my blast.
My skin was tingling, and I almost went down as Ivy’s weight suddenly became my responsibility. “Ivy!” I called, bringing up my second sight and looking for the ley line. The vampires were down. We had to move. “Come on! Just a few steps!”
But then panic took me, not that the head vampire was getting up off the pavement, but that the ley line was gone! It wasn’t running where it should, through the man-made ponds and beside the statue the vampire was leaning heavily against.
“Where is it?” I shouted, and Ivy sagged in my grip. Bewildered, and head humming as if it held a hive of bees, I strengthened my second sight until reality wavered under a broken landscape of dust, cracked rock, and bloated sun hazing an empty landscape and dry riverbed. The desolation of the ever-after was complete, and the gritty wind lifted through my hair even though I still stood in reality. But there was no line. What have I done?
Jenks hovered before me, blinking in shock. “You’re in it,” he said, a weird greenish dust sifting from him. “How did you move it, Rache?”
My mouth dropped open, and I spun, shocked. I moved the line? How?
“Get her!” the vampire screamed, and the present rushed back.
“Rhombus!” I shouted, staggering under Ivy’s weight as my circle sprang up heady and thick since I was standing right in the middle of the line. I’d moved it? How? I had only tapped it. But Jenks was right. I was standing in Al’s flimsy line, and it was growing stronger, no longer dampened and drained by the ponds. I’d shifted it. I had moved it to me.
The vampires slid to a halt, one of them screaming as he touched the circle and a snap of energy struck him like lightning. We were in the line. Ivy was with me. I looked past the angry vampires, knowing the line had been behind them, knowing it couldn’t be moved. But it had.
And somehow, I didn’t care that I’d done the impossible.
“Sorry about the beating,” I said as I melded my aura around Ivy’s to shift her with me to the ever-after.
“Beating?” The vampire leaned closer, not knowing what had happened. “That wasn’t a beating.”
I tightened my hold on the line, feeling it start to take us. “No, the one your master is going to give you.” Thank you, Jenks. I will keep her alive.
The man’s eyes became round, fear shimmering his motion for the first time, making him somehow more captivating with the contrasting shadows of fear and power. We’d bested him, and he was going to be punished.
“No!” he shouted as I shifted my aura and the world moved around us. The red of sunset became the harsh red of the ever-after sun. His howling cry of denial evolved, peaked, and became the scream of the gritty wind. The image of his crooked fingers reaching for us dissolved, and I saw it mirrored in the broken rock surrounding us. The sound of Jenks’s wings was gone. We were alone and the world was broken—just like me.
My heart thumped and I shifted Ivy’s weight until she hissed in pain. I squinted at the distant, red-smeared horizon, then brought my eyes closer, sending it over the remains of the Hollows, already in shadow. The spires of the basilica rose over it all, the bastion carefully preserved where most everything was left to crumble. The space where my church would have been was nothing but rock and grass. My idea to walk to it vanished. Ivy was done.
“You can rest now,” I whispered. “It’s going to be okay.” Heart aching, I eased her down against a boulder, and she gripped my arm, refusing to let go. My eyes shot to hers, and the utter blackness in them stitched all my fears into one smothering black piece. I couldn’t kill her to prevent her undead existence. If Bis didn’t find us in time … I … I didn’t know.
My throat was tight as I sat beside her and pulled her head to rest against me. She could move no farther, and this was as good a place as any, better than some. Whatever happened, we would face it together, away from the filth she’d struggled her entire life to escape.
The gritty wind had rubbed the skin between my short boot and pants leg raw. I huddled closer to Ivy, trying to get into the lee of the stone, but the boulder wasn’t large enough. Ivy didn’t move as my weight shifted, and I twisted my leg almost under myself to hide it. It would be asleep in about three minutes, but the respite from the wind was worth it.
Ivy’s shallow breath came and went, her scent obvious under the choking burnt amber reek that permeated the ever-after. I listened for the clink of rock or sliding rubble that would mean a surface demon as I looked over the dry bed of the Ohio River and to the crumbled remains of the Hollows below. The sun was almost down, and the light was vanishing from the basilica’s steeple inch by slow inch. Elsewhere the shadows were already thick. Behind me where Cincinnati would be, things moved, howled, and hooted as the sun vanished.
Surface demons. The large circle I’d put around us would keep them at bay, but they were gathering. No one, not even Newt, stayed still on the surface after dark—and we’d been noticed.
The