of Nothing. There was nothing elegant about the transference of power, not the way the other one I’d just seen had gone. She just stepped in, forcing her strength to merge with the other seven. Raw edges flared and burned white as they struggled to hold the shields together and accommodate Carrie’s rough entrance. The mountain shrieked pain and fear, and triumph rolled through the gray, but too soon. Carrie would die before she let the Nothing win, and she had just gotten topped up full of glowing blue healing magic. Les’s grandpa had been the weak link for a heartbeat there, but Carrie was the strong one now. It wasn’t going to last, but it didn’t need to, not with me there.
Not as long as I got my act together and got Lester Lee Senior on his feet again. I shaved off part of my concentration and built a shield around him and me, one that ran deeper and stronger than usual. I didn’t want the Nothing leaking out the edges of the power circle shielding to get even one tendril inside Les Senior while I patched him up. The world went pleasantly blue around us, a bubble of active magic so solid I hoped warheads couldn’t budge it. Then I put a hand on Les Senior’s chest and had a quick look around inside him.
I got more than an eyeful of what I expected, too. Most times I got a sense of someone’s physical well-being. This time he was so worn and raw I Saw straight into his garden, the metaphorical center of self that reflected a person’s well-being. Les Senior’s was parched and dry, red earth cracked and once-lush plant life brown and drooping. It didn’t feel like age—God knew my pal Gary, who was at least as old as Les Senior, wasn’t suffering from any kind of drying–out of his garden. This was more like Les Senior was being sucked dry. More like he’d given everything he had, and was now too exhausted to replenish himself. There was nothing else wrong with him, no clotted arteries or other common maladies of age. Gratitude surged through me. It wasn’t often I got to save two people back to back, but between Les Senior and Carrie, I was batting a thousand.
Bizarrely, fixing exhaustion was more delicate work than stopping a heart attack. Cardiac arrest was all about violence and instantaneous reaction, and shutting it down had taken the same response. Exhaustion was something that built up, and Les’s garden was so parched that throwing a metaphorical river in would just drown him. I tamped the power down to a trickle, easing the gas on, as it were, and let it drain in slowly enough that his garden’s earth had time to absorb the replenishing magic instead of being flooded by it. I couldn’t let myself pay attention to what was going on outside my shields, trusting that Carrie and the others had it under control. Or at least trusting they could triage until I was done getting Les Senior’s feet back under him.
He opened his eyes sooner than I expected, blinked a couple times, and somehow didn’t seem surprised to focus on me. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”
I swear, the old man was like Carrie, made of sprung steel and baling wire. Nothing was gonna keep them down, not until they marched out of this world and into the next, where they would probably start setting things to right all over again. I still said, “You sure?”
Les Senior nodded, and I pointed out a direction away from the boiling Nothing. “You get the hell away from that stuff, you hear me? Don’t be stupid just because you’re conscious.”
Amusement darted through his brown eyes and he nodded again. I let the shields down slowly, keeping them thickest to my left, where I’d last left the Nothing, until I was certain the world around us hadn’t disappeared entirely. It hadn’t. I pointed to my right. “You go that-a-way.”
Les Senior went as directed, and only when he was well away and into the arms of others did I get to my feet and put my hands on Carrie’s shoulders. “My turn.”
“We need you out there. Fighting.”
“I need to know what I’m fighting. I’ve got to See what’s at the heart of this thing. And you just came a hair’s breadth from a coronary. You don’t need to be shouldering this burden right now. So move it.”
I got the dirtiest look in Creation, but bit by bit Carrie transferred the weight of shielding she’d taken on to me. The power fluctuating between the eight compass points strengthened considerably as I took more of it on. Partly because I was a heavyweight in the mojo department, but partly because this transition was deliberate, rather than somebody shoving themselves in to plug a bursting dyke. After about two minutes, Carrie stepped out, and I...
...stepped up.
Because I wasn’t kidding anybody, least of all myself. I had a pretty goddamned good idea who, or at least what, was behind the pit of Nothing trying to eat out the heart of my homeland. Barely three days ago I’d effectively nailed a cross to my enemy’s door, made it clear we were about to reach a header. I’d seen him for the first time, the Master whose power was death and corruption, and I’d come damned close to losing my life.
I had lost my mother, forever and for always, to the fight against him. She’d come to protect me one last time, and had burned out everything she’d ever been, in that battle. There were old souls and new ones in this world, and my mother’s had been old, but it would never be reborn. That was the price she’d chosen to pay to keep me alive. It had given me the last bits of breathing room I needed, because it had turned out I wasn’t quite ready to face him after all. She’d left him wounded and embarrassed, and there was no chance the mess in Carolina was coincidence, not after that.
So I wasn’t screwing around when I joined the power circle. I didn’t let them have it all at once, because I’d noticed an alarming tendency for blown-out electrical grids and other exciting ramifications of announcing my psychic presence in a grand slam. But I came to the party to play, and by the time Carrie’s power faded out and mine replaced it, I was feeling pretty white-hot with magic. If there was any chance I could snuff out the Nothing, I was going to take it right now.
I expected resistance. I expected it to seep inside me and find my fear again. I expected it to ratchet that up to eleven, and for grim determination and a whole lot of stubbornness to get me through. I was prepared for that, leaning forward a little, saying, “C’mon, I can take it,” with my body language. I thought I could take it, now that I was ready for it. The fear hadn’t been as bad as the Master hitting me in the teeth with pain, and I’d survived that. Only just, but this wasn’t the time to quibble over details. So I was braced, ready for whatever the Nothing threw at me.
I was not prepared for sympathetic magic to skyrocket across the power circle, south to north, and catch me in the breastbone. Catch me right where my magic had lodged itself for all the long months before I’d really accepted it, in fact. Not my heart: my center. I wasn’t prepared for its vainglorious brilliance, four shades of brightness that whipped and blended together so fast they became white. And I was really not prepared for the boom of power that erupted when that magic and my own fused.
A visible ring bounced through the power circle like a shock wave, vibrating the mountain under our feet. Vibrating the air, vibrating sound, vibrating everything: I could’ve been standing under the bells at Notre Dame and gotten less resonance.
The gasp couldn’t have been audible, not beneath all the power noise, but it felt audible. Everyone took a step forward, a step closer together, like we were drawn in by that power burst. Part of my brain screamed an objection, not wanting to get any closer to the Nothing than it had to, but it wasn’t the part in control. I moved just like everyone else.
The Nothing shrank. Rolled in on itself, no farther than we’d stepped forward, but it got just a little bit smaller. Emotion spiked through the power circle, hope and confusion and flaring confidence. We stepped forward again, magic ricocheting between me and the southern point like some kind of earthbound display of Northern Lights. My power sluiced along the outsides of the other adept’s magic, encompassing it with silver and blue. The four bands of bright colors spun inside mine, and everybody else’s swam alongside ours, drawn back and forth at light speeds. From inside I could See the different auras, though only faintly: mostly they remained blended to brilliance, subsuming themselves to the massive working of white magic. We all took one more step forward, coming much closer to the Nothing, and a sense of nervous anticipation swept through the working. Six of them were waiting: waiting to see what the southern and northern compass points