throwing spells around, and he says “no” to me. The defiant glint in his eye is admirable but not convenient. “Look, I’m one of the good guys. Honest. I need to get in there and stop the guy who’s doing this.”
“You don’t have a suit,” he said.
“I’m a druid. I have a body shield that should work the same way,” I said. I’m not sure how long my body shield will work on the other side of the door. It doesn’t matter. Vize matters. Killing him matters more.
He shakes his head, the large hood moving from side to side. “I’m not worried about you. I’m worried that a guy with no suit is on a suicide mission.”
I grin. I like this guy. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances, and I want to hit him for slowing me down. But I like him. “Sir, I can destroy that door with my abilities. If I wanted to hurt anyone but myself, we wouldn’t be talking. You would be waking up to find a gaping hole in the wall. I’m trying to reduce risk, but if I have to sacrifice myself and everyone in this hall to try and stop Vize, I will. Please open the door.”
I can’t see his face as he looks down the hall at the other people bound in the spell. “Can you wake them up?”
I raise my arm and shoot a stream of essence down the center of the hall, tuning its resonance so that it disrupts the binding spells. One by one, people shift and sway on their feet. A few fall. “Satisfied?”
He walks to the door and punches in an access code. The system cycles. “You’re gonna die in the there, you know that, right?”
I pat him on the shoulder. “Not if I can help it. Make sure the door closes behind me and get everyone out.”
The door opens, and I don’t wait for a response from the guy. I’m in the containment area. The air is thick with essence, a cloud I can’t see through. An elven signature runs through, so it’s Vize, but there’s also a high-level resonance I’ve never seen. Vize is tapping into the reactor at a pure essence level. That’s bad.
Uncertain in the fog, my body shield shudders around me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s a response to the radiation, a bombardment of neutrinos or some such I had no clear conception of. The air is humid, and beneath the sound of the emergency sirens and the hum of machinery, I hear a low rumble, like water boiling. My sensing ability registers multiple essence signatures and a fierce white light in front of me. It’s the spent–fuel rod pool.
I reach a metal railing and watch rising essence warp and twist around it. It’s water, a fine mist rising in the air. The surface of the containment is low—too low according to warning signs painted on the inner surface of the pool. I jog along the edge, sifting through the signatures for Vize. My senses are all screwed up, and I slam into a wall of solid air. Beyond it, powerful essence shimmers evergreen. It moves closer, resolving into the shape of a man. Vize appears in the mist.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“You can do all your talking in a jail cell,” I say.
He shifts his attention to the pool. “We don’t have much time. You need to speak to Nigel Martin. Maeve is going to try to kill us. We have to stop her.”
Ignoring him, I test the barrier with essence-infused hands, searching for weak points. There are always weak spots, no matter how good you are. “Looks like you’re the one that’s going to kill us if you expose those fuel rods,” I say.
“I need the radiation. No matter what I say, you aren’t going to believe me because you’ve been lied to. I am not going to let Maeve kill me this time.”
Of course, I don’t believe him. The man has killed people in his war against the Seelie Court. I have no idea what he’s saying about Maeve’s killing him. I decide to keep him talking to distract him while I break the barrier. “Maeve isn’t going to kill you. I might, though. Reverse the spell and cover the rods.”
“There’s no one like us in the world, Grey. Only we can stop her if we join together,” he said.
He stands before me, a look of fevered hope on his face. His youth surprises me, his almost black hair worn long for an elf, fanning out as though filled with static. I had thought him older. He holds his hands about a foot apart in front of him. A gold ring hovers between them, pulsing with essence, revolving around a shaft of light. “This is how we do it,” he said.
“Do what?” I ask. I find a thin spot in the barrier, a space where radiation from the pool rubs against it, wearing it down.
“Stop Convergence. I need you to drop your body shield,” he says.
I chuckle and return my attention to the weak spot. A few well-placed bursts of essence should propagate through the barrier and destabilize the shield spell. “And why would I do that?”
“Because this will be more painful otherwise,” he says.
I debate whether to humor him and drop the shield. I’d have plenty of time to reengage my shield if he dropped the barrier to attack. I decide against it. I probably wouldn’t like being bombarded with radiation from the pool just to play with his mind. “I guess we’ll have to go the pain route.”
I hit the weak spot with a blast of essence. Vize curses under his breath as he redirects his spell to deflect the hit. It doesn’t work. His ring falls to the floor at his feet. The barrier crumbles, and I leap at him. His eyes lock with mine, and he smiles. “One door opens; another closes,” he says.
I reach for the ring. He anticipates my attack. Even as my feet leave the floor, he is down on one knee, arm raised, and lets fly a bolt of elf-shot. It pierces my shield and slams into my head. Something tears inside me as I fall to the floor. I have never experienced such pain, never imagined it.
Vize grabs the ring and puts it on a finger of his left hand. He holds it up. The essence in my head refuses to dissipate, ricocheting against the inside of my skull. Vize clenches his fist and withdraws the elf-shot from my head. I twist in pain, watching in horror as the green essence jumps free with a brilliant shard of gold essence—my essence. He’s pulled a piece of my body signature, my living essence, my utter soul. Vize grabs the mote of my essence in his ringed hand and fuses his essence into mine.
The floor vibrates with the shock of a concussive force. Vize stumbles back, surprise on his face as he looks up. I turn as a sheet of flaming essence sweeps the air. Great wings swirl with red and golden fire. They descend, and I recognize the body signature. Manus ap Eagan alights on the far side of the pool.
“It’s too soon. You aren’t strong enough,” he shouts. He releases a volley of essence, white strikes of lightning burning with power. The essence tangles in the radiation vapor, splinters, and hits Vize. It leaps along his arm like wild static and burns out through the ring.
Vize and I scream as something blossoms in the white haze, something dark and hot, something wrong. The darkness flares out like a claw, knocking me on my back, throwing Vize off his feet, tossing Eagan away into the mist. Vize thrusts his hand in the air, into the darkness, and releases another burst of elf-shot. The darkness swallows it in silence, then descends onto Vize’s hand. A piece of it fractures and hits me in the face. Darkness descends across my vision, then across my mind, like the slow descent of a falling curtain, like the closing of my eye, like my mind blinking.
My mind blinked.
Everything is white. I am running. Everything is white. He looks over his shoulder at me. He looks determined…. or crazed…. I can’t tell. Everything is white. One minute we were facing each other, and now everything is white. He stops. He looks surprised. There is someone lying on the ground. Something about him is familiar. Everything is white, and there is no ground. There is someone lying in the white. Everything….
My mind blinked.
I stand on a plain, white grass waving against a white sky. It’s not winter, pray, what is this new madness? Where have I come? I turn in place, searching, searching across the plain, searching about the standing stones, but Maeve is not there. Was she? What is this place?
The stones shimmer and glow with essence. It is more than Maeve expected, more than she could have suspected. It is too much. She has overstepped.
“Stand aside,” she says.
I face her in the stone circle. Its radiance grows as the essence of the source is released. “It’s too much, Maeve. We can’t do this. It will destroy everything,” I say.
“Everything but Faerie—
