BloodAngel Page 16

  The magic changes you.

  And she knew, then, despite her apparent lack of progress, that the magic was moving inside her, working itself closer to those doors in her mind. Sooner or later, they would all open wide. She felt wild at the thought of it: as if she was speeding down the highway with nothing in her way but moonlight. The other questions—what she would become, where this would lead and what she might find in the aftermath—got kicked aside. Keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road. Sharp curves ahead. Somewhere in the distance was the boy.

  * * * *

  At the end of another session—by now she had lost count of how many they had had together—Jess said, "Tell me how you visit the Dreamlines. It's like mindcasting?"

  "No. Mindcasting is when you send part of your mind out from your body, to probe and explore the immediate environment—"

  "I realize that. We've been practicing that."

  He dealt with her impatience the way he usually did: he ignored it. "Soulcasting is an extraordinarily deep level of meditation in which you send your soul into the Dreamlines. It leaves your body extremely vulnerable to attack. And it's possible to lose yourself in the Dreamlines, unable to find your way back."

  "Will I be able to do it? Soulcast?"

  "Not yet."

  "You can do this?"

  "I need to be near or inside another presence of magic."

  "You need to feed off the power of someone else?"

  He didn't answer.

  Jess persisted, "So it follows that the stronger this other magic presence is, the deeper into the Dreamlines you can travel?"

  "Yes."

  "This place," Jess said, "this demon-prison, or whatever you call it… there is magic here. The air shimmers with it."

  When he didn't answer immediately, she said, "Kai?"

  "Yes," he said, and nodded.

  * * * *

  And then, something changed. Even as she went behind her closed eyes and moved into the hallway of doors, things felt so vivid—

  —And she was, simply, there, the dream-hallway as solid and real to her as the candles and silk rugs had been moments earlier. Jess Shepard stared down a long tilting hallway of shifting multicolored light, the wind blasting her face. Kai, she tried to yell, but the name caught in her throat like a fishhook. She felt no exhilaration now, only the wild scrambling urge to get back, where it was safe—

  Get it together. The voice of her uncle, the Judge, spoke up inside her head. Are you a coward, girl? This is my house, and I will allow no cowards in my house.

  "You know where you are," said a voice from beside her.

  She turned, saw the blue-eyed figure of Delkor Lokk, the way he must have looked before his demon went into him. He wore a blue caftan and rough sandals, his skin the texture of leather.

  He said, "Welcome to the wild country of your mind. It's nice here."

  "So you've decided to set up camp?"

  "Don't worry, sweet Jess. I'm a good houseguest. I won't leave the bathroom all stinky and messy. I won't snoop through your most private possessions. Well… not all of them."

  "I'm not inclined," Jess said wryly, "to trust you."

  "Jess Jess Jess." He gave her a leathery grin. "I am the monkey wrench, clunking around the big bad machine. See, sweetling child, sweetling friend of my sweetling prince, I may not be for you. But I may not be against you, either."

  She was staring at him, trying to recognize him as some kind of mind-phantom: a fantasy her own deeper, dreaming self had sent up to her.

  Down the hall, one of the doors was swinging open.

  Something came swooping, fluttering, into the hallway. It touched ground inside the silvery light-shaft and cocked its head at Jess.

  It was a bird. Sleek dark wings tucked against a darker body. Its eyes were the same blue as Jess's own.

  "My silly know-nothing child," Del said. "I believe I hear the sound of your cherry finally popping."

  Jess knelt and reached out to the bird.

  It spread out its wings and flew at her. The sound of wings grew louder, like thunder, as the bird screeched once and wheeled into her face and the black wings covered her eyes—

  And the hallway of doors was gone.

  Delkor Lokk was gone.

  She was awake now, returned to the meditation room, the faded silk weave of the layered rugs beneath her knees, the leaping twisting candlelight. Back in the thumping, flesh-and-blood truth of her body. "Oh my God," she whispered. She was trembling, her shirt damp with perspiration.

  Kai was leaning against the doorway.

  "Congratulations," he said, low-voiced. "The first spell is the breakthrough. You'll find the others come more quickly."

  "It was a bird."

  "The bird is the spell," Kai said patiently. "It is the form the spell takes in order to announce itself to you. The magic operates through symbols, Jess."

  "Like dreams," she said.

  "The magic creates its own language. And that language is different for everyone."

  "You talk like it's a living, natural force."

  "It is," Kai said, and seemed surprised that she hadn't understood. He reached out for her hand, silver nails glinting, and helped her up. Her legs were cramped and shaky. She didn't know how long she had been sitting there. Kai lowered his head, eyes darkening. His grasp on her wrist tightened, then he nodded to himself and let go. "Summoner's eye," he murmured. "Impressive." He began to explain it to her.

  Later—again, how to measure time in a place that had no time? Only that it felt like a very long time—Jess sat at the small desk in her bedroom, holding her pen over the leather-bound notebook. She hesitated, then began to write:

  This is how the magic comes to me: In bits and pieces. In code.

  And still later, the words starting to come more easily:

  I don't know how exactly I'm supposed to use this. This book. It appears to be some kind of hybrid between a journal and a spellbook. Or maybe not. Maybe there's no real distinction between the two, not in this strange existence. This new thing my life has become.

  Kai gave it to me after my first spell broke. (This is the term he uses—spells "breaking," as if they were eggs).

  "I don't keep diaries," I said. As if the notebook was one of those little-girl things with its own lock and key, instead of a lovely leather volume. Empty creamy pages of unlined parchment. I don't like lined pages. Never did.

  "You'll need this."

  "Need it?"

  "You'll need to write in it. Think of your head and body as a container that can only hold so much before threatening to break apart—this" (he nodded at the notebook) "—is how and where you channel that excess energy."

  "What, like therapy?"

  Kai actually laughed. For a while I wasn't sure he even had a sense of humor. Now I realize that yes, it's there, this quiet little glint behind his eyes. He said, "More practical than that. It's the place to channel the excess—the overspill—from you into your book, which will become more and more an extension of you. The more magical you become, the more magical your book becomes. It becomes a part of you. Understand?"

  "I'm trying, Kai." And I am. I'm trying to wrap my head around all of this. "So what exactly do I write?"

  "You'll write exactly what you need to write."

  But I think I'm beginning to understand. I feel the magic building up inside me. It's like electricity… it's both from me, born of me, and from outside me at the same time… like something inside me has been unlocked and thrown wide, wide open… and the magic within calls to magic without… so magic finds me, enters me and moves inside my blood, my bones, where it churns and builds and generates more of itself, and needs release… it feels like swallowing a bolt of lightning. Again and again and again.

  But the magic isn't meant to be gathered and hoarded, at least not for long. It is meant to be expressed. It needs to be expressed. As I write this—my pen moving faster and more frantically across the page—I can feel how the ac
t of writing this throws off stray tendrils of magic even now—I can hear the soft hiss as the magic sinks into these pages, as the notebook turns into a weird kind of container—my writing, my magic, and me, all jumbled together in this book, impossible to pick apart.

  How long have I been here? If I tilt my memory one way, it feels like forever. Tilt my memory another, and it feels like ten minutes.

  Another spell is about to break. I went into meditation today, went into the training image—the hallway, the doors—and I can feel this new spell, waiting behind one of those doors, not quick and gentle like the first few, but harder, hotter, darker. It won't slip out from behind the door so much as batter it down. I think this one might hurt.

  * * * *

  He was stronger here, in this place. He could feel the magic moving into him and through him and he felt confident enough, for the first time in a very long time, to send himself into the Dreamlines.

  Soulcasting. Jess had tasted the word, moving it around her tongue for a moment. And why do you need to do this?

  To travel, to look around, to gather information, mostly. And—He paused here, because this wasn't an easy concept to explain. To regenerate.

  Visiting the Dreamlines is like getting your battery recharged?

  It exhausts you and tears you down, he said, but then, when you recover, you're stronger for it.

  Like working out, she said. You damage the muscle so that it repairs itself into something stronger, bigger.

  Good analogy.

  Then can you damage yourself enough to get all your power back?

  For that to happen I would have to travel deep, very deep, deep enough to touch the source, the heart of magic itself—and in order for me, or for anyone, to do that… Kai let his voice trail off. He didn't want to continue, but Jess was looking at him with too much expectation. So he said, simply, Soulcasting isn't enough.

  What is?

  He was silent.

  Kai, what is? And he didn't know what she saw in his face, just then, but her voice dropped low and her eyes turned wary and… concerned? Was she concerned for him?

  The heart of magic, he said, is where things begin. And end.

  She said, Does this involve a bloodprice?

  He was startled. Bloodprice? Where did you hear that?

  Kai. How much damage is enough?

  But he couldn't, wouldn't answer.

  Now, he closed the door to the stark little chamber and settled himself on the dais. He closed his eyes and plunged into the dark light of himself, until he felt the magic rushing around him, surrounding him, and pulling him through himself and into the Dreamlines.

  He let himself drift, to get used to the space and darkness again, to the weird disembodied feeling of being something and nothing at the same time. He had heard that under rare and strange circumstances it was possible to take your physical body into the Dreamlines—to walk through them as you would walk through any hallway—but he had never encountered anyone who had done this and doubted he ever would.

  As he became oriented, his vision adjusted and the darkness took on depth and dimension. His gaze picked out the lights, faint at first and then brighter, brighter, like ropes pulled taut through the darkness, out to its very edges. He drifted through the different strands, feeling out the shades and intensities and textures, until he came to one that went through him and tasted familiar, and the name fell inside him like a stone down a well. He said the name: Eagan.

  It was as if the name swallowed him up completely and spit him out into a completely different place—

  —What looked to be some kind of martial-arts studio.

  Here, he felt even less substantial than he had been in the Dreamlines, slipping through eddies of air as, below him, a dozen or so kids stood in two neat lines and finished up a punching/kicking drill. The youngest was maybe six, the oldest well into her teens, all of them in neatly pressed white uniforms, belts tied snugly around their middles.

  The drill finished, they snapped their legs together and their arms straight against their bodies.

  "Kam-sa-ham-ni-da," the instructor said, and bowed.

  "Kam-sa-ham-ni-da," they echoed, and returned the bow.

  The kids scattered, talking and laughing as they headed off to the changing rooms, then emerged in jeans and coats and spilled out the doors. Kai could imagine the wet, earthy smells blowing in from outside, mingling with the sweat cast off from so many hardworking bodies. The instructor stayed in his office for a bit and then walked over to the punching bag in the corner. His kicks started simple and became more complicated: soon he was jumping, spinning, slamming into the bag. Kai had to smile. Eagan was showing off.

  "I know you're about," he said. "You mad dog, you. Doing a little walking on the Dreamlines, eh?"

  You look well. Kai relayed his thoughts and could tell, from the way Eagan stood and smirked, that he was picking up clearly. Last I heard you were still in that mental institution.

  "I was running it, you bastard. No one's seen fit to commit me just yet."

  You know why I'm here?

  "I can guess."

  Bakal Ashika.

  "Yes." Eagan did some kind of complex jumping spinning kick combination that Kai couldn't begin to identify. "Six demon pals in six different prison-spheres, and she hasn't made a move on any of them. So far as I can see or tell."

  I've been with Del. There's no sign of her here, either.

  "So what do you think she's planning?"

  Not sure.

  "Maybe she's not planning anything."

  You believe that?

  "Hell no." Eagan cut his eyes towards the place where he guessed Kai to be. He was off by a couple of feet. "But maybe she only wants you. For now."

  This obsession she has with atonement.

  "Aye. That the suffering of others—especially you—will make up for her own. That some kind of cosmic balance will be restored."

  More than that, I think. She draws power from the blood, the pain. It fuels her.

  "Strip away the bloodmagic and she's just another sadist."

  The demon-hunger.

  "It never stops," Eagan agreed. "It never ends. Or so they like to tell us."

  I want her spellbooks. Who has them?

  Eagan stepped back from the bag and lifted his hands a little. "I kept my hands clean of that," he said. "They should have been destroyed, those things."

  That would have been idiotic. Who has them?

  "I chose," Eagan said, "not to know. Or else I might have read them myself." His smile was tight and grim.

  * * * *

  He found Romany on a train somewhere in eastern Europe. She was sitting in a passenger car with three people she did not appear to know; she was jotting notes in a spiral-bound notebook. In the last fifty years, Romany had developed a reputation as a travel writer who experimented with fiction. The landscape rushing past the windows was green, wooded: a blur of shadowed lace.

  He hovered above the splintered door frame, gazing down. She was small for a Sajae, with broad cheekbones and calm, dark eyes, her black hair swept up off her neck. She stood up and walked underneath him, sliding the door behind her. She walked down the corridor. Her body swayed with the motion of the train. A loudspeaker crackled static; the conductor announced upcoming destinations in several different languages.

  Romany glanced into the cars she passed, then ducked into an empty one and shut and locked the door.

  "Hello, Kai," she said, and smiled.

  It's really good to see you.

  She stretched out her arms, as if reaching for an embrace or measuring the distance between them. "I'm impressed," she said. "I haven't been able to dreamwalk in ages."

  I'm visiting a prison-sphere. Good energy to work with.

  She nodded. "The rumors. Are they true?"

  Yes.

  "I've been having…" She paused, then said, "Bakal killed your lover in St. Martin's?"

  And her small son. Yes.

 
"I saw that in my dreams. I'm so sorry, Kai."

  I need her spellbooks. Who has them?

  "Ask Mak. He had them for a while—don't know if he still does."

  Makonnen? He took them? Did he try to read them?

  "I think he did. And I think…" She paused, then said, "I think it was more than he could handle, Kai. I think his mind… Well, maybe it was cracking anyway. Have you checked in on the others?"

  Eagan's in Montreal, teaching martial arts—

  Romany laughed and rolled her eyes.

  Sato's in Australia. Near Alice Springs. Working as a healer.

  "Still? Doesn't he get bored?"

  Daki's on a yacht. She's near Tonga, maybe, I couldn't really tell.

  "I miss Daki," she said. Then: "How did we all get so cut off from each other?"

  I think we wanted to. Lose each other. After all that happened.

  She took this in with a small nod. "Mina?"

  She's… lost her grip a little. Del's guardianship has taken its toll.

  She nodded again. "She's not the only one. We're in trouble, aren't we?"

  Yes.

  "I like this world. I don't want to watch it burn."

  Nor do I. He paused, then said, I want to open a teleportation spell that will bring the Pact together. When and where it's needed.

  "Kai. You can't do that anymore. None of us can."

  Not yet, Kai said.

  "You would have to—"

  Enter the heart of the Dreamlines. I know that.

  "Get all the way there, and all the way back? It would smash your soul to bits. Which wouldn't accomplish anything."

  But Ashika's in the game, now, and that changes things. If I get close to her…

  "Ashika wants to kill you."

  Not quickly.

  She stared into space for several moments, gathering his meaning.

  "Bloodmagic," she said. "Sacrifice."

  Self-sacrifice.

  "Kai," she said, and then stopped. It was clear, as wheels churned in the tracks and wind whistled through the sliver between window and frame, that she didn't know what to say.

  * * * *

  Makonnen was the most difficult of them to find; his link in the Dreamlines seemed faint, tenuous. Kai tracked it through to a sun-scorched district of Soweto. South Africa again: he had not been here since his encounter with the child Jess; but this township outside of Johannesburg was very different from the luxury hotels and tourist attractions of Cape Town.