“Now, maybe?” Al prompted as he tugged his sleeves down. “It’s going to take me hours to get the sand out of my hair. And stay out of that purple shit.”
I looked at the evil purple line, swirls of red vanishing at its black core. “Not a problem.” Taking a slow breath, I closed my eyes and willed myself across the realities. It was different from using a line to jump, and demons seldom did it unless they were dragging an unwilling slave across realities—it was akin to taking a horse downtown when everyone else had a hovercar.
The whine from the line shifted, and I opened my eyes, seeing a ghostlike Al still standing beside me with a shimmer of red between us. The air lacked the bite of burnt amber, and the damned wind that always seemed to be blowing in the ever-after was gone. I could hear birds, and under my feet were weeds and grass. The sound of running water was faint, and tall trees leafed out for spring stood around me. Exhaling, I turned. Behind me Loveland Castle was whole again, albeit a dumpy little building falling apart—one man’s dream of nobility crumbling from neglect. Noble ideas tended to do that when left alone.
“Well?” Al prompted, and I turned to him, catching my balance in surprise. The weirdness of the line was impacting everything. The vision of the dusty, sunbaked surface of the ever-after was superimposed over the lush greenery of the raised garden area of the castle, but the purple-and-black line looked about the same from this side as the other.
I lowered the parasol and squinted up at the yellow sun. “It’s hard to tell. Mind if I step away and see what it looks like from outside the line?”
“Hurry up about it,” he grumped, and I took several hasty steps backward until the unsettling scrape across my nerves vanished. My soft headache went with it, and I took a breath of clean air. I was completely in reality, and I brought out the phone from my back pocket, checking the time. I had about fifteen minutes until Jenks summoned me, and knowing Al was becoming impatient, I texted Trent I was okay and to have Jenks give me another hour.
Unfortunately, the line looked about the same from this reality, though the grating whine that remained was a slightly higher pitch. Snapping my phone closed, I looked over the area to try to determine if anyone had been here. The weeds right under the line were all ramrod straight, as if they were being tugged upward. It was weird, and crouching just outside the line, I ran a hand under it, watching the grass spring back. The ground between the clumps of weeds looked as if it had been vacuumed.
I stifled a shiver and rose. Thinking my parasol must look silly, I closed it. They did have tours at the castle, occasionally. I could see no evidence that anyone had been here in weeks, and I stepped back into the line. Al seemed to relax as I became slightly more real to him, slightly closer to his reality. “Well?” he prompted.
I shrugged, scuffing my boots in the grass. “It looks the same, but the pitch of the whine is higher. The grass, though . . .” I kicked at a tuft. “It’s growing funny. Straight up, like it’s being pulled. Even the ground looks like anything not nailed down got sucked up into it.”
“Maybe it did.” Al ducked under the purple line, shuddering as he came up on the other side, closer to me. “The purple seems to be a physical manifestation of a heavy leak of energy.”
“Where’s it going?” I asked. “The energy, I mean?”
Al held his arms behind his back, adopting a posture of lecture that I recognized from our days and nights in his kitchen/lab. “When the sun is up, energy flows from reality into the ever-after; when the sun goes down, the flow reverses.” His voice echoed, ghostlike. “The problem is that less is flowing into the ever-after than is going out. That purple line? I don’t know what in the two worlds that is. It appears to disrupt the natural ebb and flow, sucking in energy like an event horizon. Making it worse than it should be.”
Al sighed, and I willed myself back to the ever-after. The wind hit me like a slap, and I popped my parasol back open. “I’m sorry,” I said as I walked around the line to join him.
“For what?” he said sarcastically. “You’ve done so much.”
I fidgeted. “For making the line to begin with, I suppose. How did you balance yours?”
Al gave me an askance look before rocking into motion, distancing himself. “I tweaked it until it was within proper parameters, but we can’t do that with yours because it is a reality-to-reality-based line. Besides, you need to know how to jump a line first.”
My jaw clenched, then relaxed. Bis had to teach me, and he was too young.
“Even so,” Al said as he waved a dry stalk of ever-after grass through the purple line, then inspected it for damage, grunting as if something pleased him. “I don’t think knowing how to jump a line will help. No, this purple shit is different.” He straightened and dropped the stalk. “We should be able to do something about it. Buy us some time. Put us back where we were yesterday.”
The first faint stirrings of hope began in me. “What do you have in mind?”
He flashed me a quick grin, and I felt as if I’d done something right. “Stay here,” he said, waving his white- gloved hands dramatically. “I’ll be right back.”
“Al?” I called out, but he’d vanished. Nervous, I gazed across the bleak, sunbaked earth and the dry riverbed, feeling the bits of windblown earth hit me. I didn’t like being alone on the surface, and I twirled my parasol. My hair was going to be impossible to get through tonight.
Almost immediately he stumbled back in, his head down and back hunched. “Ah, here,” he said, his goat- slitted eyes meeting mine from over his dark-tinted glasses. “Put this on.”
It was a small black ring, and I looked at it in my palm, seeing there was a new lump of a circlet under his glove. Uneasy, I eyed him.
“I’m not giving it to you,” he huffed. “It’s a loan. For a few minutes. I want it back.”
“It’s a ring,” I said flatly, not able to tell if it was black gold or simply tarnished.
“Sharp as a tack, that one,” Al grumped. “You want to put it on, now? Pick a finger.”
I spread the fingers of my left hand, and I swear, he made a small noise of dismay. I looked up to see his jaw clenched. “What does it do?”
Al grimaced, shifting from foot to foot. “I, ah, it’s a life rope of sorts. That is, me in the ever-after to pull your ass out of the fire if I’m wrong, and you in reality, fixing it.”
Fixing the line was the entire point, and I didn’t mind having a safety rope. If it was a ring, then that was cool. Still I hesitated; the ring seemed to soak in the harsh light. It was heavy on my palm, and I had the insane desire to drop it into a fire and see if an inscription appeared. I set the open parasol down, and it rolled in the wind until catching against a large rock.
“The rings will allow us to function as a single energy entity across the realities,” Al said, standing almost sideways to me as he looked out over nothing. “I think.”
“You think?” I said, starting to understand. “Is that like a power pull?”
Al leered, the wind shifting the gritty lank curls of his hair. “If you want.”
Head shaking, I extended the ring back to him. “No.”
He rolled his eyes, looking at the washed-out sky and refusing to take it. “You are utterly without a sense of humor today,” he said, and my hand dropped. “We will simply be able to borrow upon and find each other’s chi with minimal disruption.”
These were more than just rings, and I wanted the truth of it. “Al,” I said forcefully. “What are these? You have one, too. I can see it under your glove.”
Shoulders slumping, he showed me his back. “Nothing,” he said, the wind almost obliterating his voice. “They’re nothing now but a way to yank your butt out of the fire.” He turned around, and his lost look surprised me. “Go through the line to reality,” he said, gesturing. “You should be able to hear me whether you’re in the line or not if you have the ring on. You’ll have a better chance fixing it if you work from the reality you made it from.” I hesitated, and he added, “Think of them as a scrying mirror, without the eavesdropping.”
Unsure, I looked at the simple band of tarnished metal. A private line to each other’s thoughts was a rather questionable connection—not a violation as such, but very . . . personal. It didn’t help that they looked like wedding bands.
Against my better judgment, I slipped the ring on my index finger. Wavering on my feet, I felt my consciousness expand. It was exactly like a scrying mirror, but the connection was tighter, far more intimate. I could feel not just Al’s presence, but sense his masculinity, his worry, his concern. I could sense the limits of his chi, and I knew to the last iota how much it could hold, the power he could wield. It wasn’t as much as I could. It wasn’t that he lacked. Female demons had a naturally elevated ability to harbor two souls behind one aura, as in
