Heartland

'What was that?'

'I don't know.' I rubbed the skin of my wrist, trying to get the blood moving again through the mottled flesh. Part of me was wondering what I had seen in that naked terror in her eyes. We are all bound to something, be it darkness or light, the Chorus whispered, recalling the New Year's Day morning and the promises offered and taken between us. Sometimes we choose which, and sometimes it is chosen for us.

She fumbled with her seat belt suddenly, struggling to get out of the confines of the car. She was halfway out when she threw up. I rooted around in the bag of processed food I had gotten at an all-night stop a few hours ago for something resembling a clean napkin, and when I got out of the car and offered it to her, she had finished heaving up the contents of her stomach. She accepted the cheap napkin and wiped her mouth.

There were stars in the sky. Orion looked down on us, and I felt less frightened knowing the heavens were still there. Whatever had happened could be more mundane than the terrifying cosmological possibilities of the onset of darkness if the stars were still in the sky. I knew their light was an echo, a stream of electrons that had been traveling for years and years, but my tiny human brain clung to them. Let us choose this.

'Can you feel it?' Marielle asked, and when I shook my head, she grabbed my arm. The Chorus flowed down and leaped across the connection of our flesh, and I felt the sucking emptiness again. We were standing on the lip of the Abyss, its yawning need a persistent whisper in our heads. Give of yourself. Give everything. Feed us; we are so hungry.

Like the circadian buzz of the soul-dead in Portland, their psychic chatter burrowing into my head as I had walked back to the tower and the unholy theurgic mirror.

'The leys are gone.'

My eyes grew accustomed to the low gleam of starlight. The road was there, under our feet and the wheels of the car; a thin breeze, barely a whisper of breath, touched my face when I looked around; but, other than the hum of the car engine and the repeating warning bell of an open door, there was no other sound. The world was still there; it was just a dead zone.

'Look,' she said, pointing. Instinctively, I tried to orient myself on the compass points, but without the ley energies, I couldn't tell what direction she was pointing. Over there was the best I could do.

A nearly invisible scatter of light clung to the horizon, like a dying searchlight that wasn't strong enough to penetrate a damp coastal fog. Too many shadows. Too many echoes.

'How close are we to Mont-Saint-Michel?' she asked.

'I'm not sure. Fifty kilometers maybe. We passed Caen a while back.'

I looked toward the other horizon as if I could see the invisible wall of force that had blown through the leys and scattered them. They hadn't been consumed; they had been driven away, and in the absence of that force, they would come back. All things return to fill a vacuum.

'We need to go,' I said.

The oubliette at the Chapel of Glass. When the spell holding the grid at bay came down, the psychic energy came back, rushing to fill the void.

I realized how Marielle had been able to pinpoint the light on the horizon. The sucking vacuum wasn't coming from her; she was too attuned to the leys not to feel the hunger of a land bereft of its natural energies, and it was hungriest at the epicenter of the blast.

Beneath Mont-Saint-Michel.

XXI

There was a warehouse fire raging in the industrial district of Avranches. The rest of the city was dark but for isolated pockets of generator-powered illumination, and the fire was a vibrant spectacle of orange and yellow. Beyond the fire, we could see the psychic glow surrounding Mont-Saint-Michel.

Still a ways off, floating in a sea of darkness, the fortified island and cathedral were covered in a haze of sparkling motes. The void at the island was nearly palpable, and the ambient glitter of distressed energy was a pervasive cloud surrounding the rocky spire. Somewhere between ash and snow, the bleak cloud made Mont- Saint-Michel seem like it was caught in a localized snow storm. Fog and ice, filled with glittering reflections of moonlight. A storm made visible only because of the pure darkness beneath it.

Marielle hadn't said a word ever since we had first spotted the island, but I knew what she was thinking. Antoine. He had the ring and the key, and Vivienne had been certain that he knew what to do with them. He had come to fetch the Spear before us, and had triggered some sort of psychic trap.

Though to call it a 'trap' was to categorize it as the same sort of thing one used to catch rabbits or squirrels or even a bear; this was on a different scale entirely. But the principle was the same: put your hand in for the prize, trigger the snare, and it all comes down on you. In this case, it was like yanking a lever and having a small-yield nuclear warhead drop on you.

Every kilometer we drove got us closer to the island, but it wasn't fast enough for Marielle. The Chorus was turning in an ever-tightening gyre, feeding off her tension. It wasn't just concern for Antoine, there was another, deeper, panic surging in her chest as well. A paralyzing fear, the sort you never thought possible, but which was caught in your chest now as if it had always been there, as if it had been lurking for a long time, waiting to squeeze your heart. The Chorus knew that sensation, and we circled each other, memory and instinct spinning in frenzied orbits.

The GPS guided me to the frontage road that ran along the tide flats, and I ignored the water on the road as best I could, drifting and praying through each turn that the wheels would find dry pavement again. This close, there was physical damage, evidence that the leys had been scattered from their regular paths. The pavement was cracked in places, jarring edges that slammed against the wheels as I drove over them. The tide was in too, further than it had been in years, and sections of the road were under black water. Fortunately, none of it deep enough to swamp the car engine. Yet. I fully expected each puddle to be the big one that would drown the car, but our luck held.

Until we reached the causeway out to the island. Here the ash was thicker, and my lower spine started to ache.

An SUV with its emergency lights flashing blocked the road, and though Marielle wanted me to drive around it, I slowed to a stop. The gendarme who had been waving us off ran over to my side of the car.

'What the hell are you doing?' he shouted at us as I rolled down the window. 'There's no road ahead. Where are you going?' His voice was high and strained. However long he had been positioned here had been too long for his nervous system. His face was white with stress, and his eyeballs twitched back and forth like a meth addict going into withdrawal. The ash fell on his cap and melted, white going dark.

Lights going out. .

Marielle was out of the car before I could shake off the memory, and the gendarme straightened up to admonish her. She got in close, grappling for his keys, and for a moment, he didn't understand why. It was enough of a pause for her to find what she was looking for and to get her other hand on his face. A small star flared in the palm of her hand and he went down, his fingers digging at his eyes.

'Marielle.' I tried to not hit the gendarme with the car door, and by the time I got to the SUV, she was already behind the wheel. I banged on the driver's window as she started the car. 'Where are you going to go?' I shouted. 'The tide is in too far, and the road is out. You heard him. You can't get there by car.'

She slammed her foot down on the accelerator, and the SUV's tires screamed on the pavement. The car fishtailed, nearly clipping me as I leaped back, and shot off down the empty causeway. I had no idea how much of the road was gone, or how far away the break was, and even though I had no hope of catching the car on foot, I ran after her.

Winded, my side burning, I reached the first break in the road. Chorus-sight showed the other side, and it wasn't far-probably not more than fifteen feet-but it was far enough. Chest heaving, I glanced about for some sign of Marielle or the SUV. There were no marks on the pavement as if she had tried to stop, no sign of the car in the