It was hurting Nash, too. Nash clenched his fists, the pistol still in one, eyes shut in silent agony.
“What are you doing?” Maya shouted. “Nash!”
“He’s negating the curse,” Cassandra said from within the protective circle of Pamela’s arm.
“
“He’s a magic null.” Cassandra sounded tired. “His touch renders anything magical harmless. Spells don’t work on him, and he can pull in even the strongest magic and dissipate it.”
I yelled again, my voice breaking as I collapsed to the floor. Mick tried to get to me, to help me, but his knees buckled as soon as he took a step.
Fremont crouched down and touched my shoulder, but Mick snarled at him. “Get away from her!”
Fremont raised his hands and backed away. “Easy there, big fella. Easy now.”
There was something wrong. Nash continued to suck in the wards, and I felt the last of them rush into him and vanish. But whatever was inside Nash didn’t stop at the wards. It reached out to me and then to Mick and began to drain us dry.
My Beneath magic flared up to stop him, but Nash sucked that in, too. The white-hot aura of it streamed into Nash’s body, and the agony of that had me falling flat to the tile. I saw Mick’s fire being pulled from him while Mick fought a losing battle to keep it.
“Ow!” Fremont said, slapping his hands to his head.
A tiny stream of yellow light—Fremont’s magic—yanked from him to Nash’s body. Cassandra was on the floor now, Pamela with her, as Nash drained their magical essences as well. A scream so high-pitched it was on the edge of human hearing streamed from the saloon, the magic mirror singing no longer.
Coyote shimmered and became the man Coyote, lying naked, facedown on the floor. Ansel stopped banging in the kitchen, and I wondered if he were dead, the magic that kept him alive stolen by Nash’s magic suction. Ansel might be nothing but decaying blood and bone on my refrigerator floor.
“Nash, stop,” I gasped.
He didn’t, and I had the feeling he had no idea how to. Mick lay next to me where he’d crawled in an effort to protect me. His tattoos faded to thin lines of ink, and then those shrank and disappeared. Cassandra struggled to breathe, and Pamela lay limply next to her. Coyote didn’t move.
Maya wasn’t affected, being the only non-magical one among us. She stared at us as we slowly died, the magic that had been part of us all our lives draining away.
Then she looked at Nash. I watched Maya draw a breath for courage, and then she stalked across the floor in her milehigh heels, grabbed Nash, and jerked away him from the wall.
Nash turned on her with eyes as white as twenty suns. Maya let him go in surprise, and Nash moved that awful gaze to the rest of us.
He’d absorbed everything. He shouldn’t have been able to do that—Nash only affected magic within a certain radius, or only if touched by it directly. He’d never simply stood in one place and sucked in all magic around him.
“Maya, get away from me,” Nash said, voice harsh. “Get out of here.”
I wanted to encourage her to go, to run, but I had no strength for speech. Fremont climbed to his feet, looking the least sick of the rest of us, but still not looking good.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Maya said. This from the woman who’d been the first to beat on the door when the curse locked us in. “Nash, what is happening to you?”
“I can’t.” Nash dragged in a harsh breath. “I can’t contain it.”
He’d just absorbed the power of a dragon, a major witch, a Changer, a Stormwalker with goddess magic, and a magic mirror, not to mention Coyote’s god magic and the supercharged wards of the hotel. And Nash seemed surprised he couldn’t contain it.
Nash’s eyes became incandescent. He threw back his head, opened his arms, and roared as the magic came pouring back out of him.
The Beneath and Stormwalker magic slammed into me simultaneously. The impact lifted me several feet and threw me across the room, and I landed hard against the reception counter. Cassandra started retching. Fremont sat down on the floor, his hands to his head. Mick shouted, his body on fire, and I saw his flesh crackle and expand, the dragon in him trying to get out.
All I could do was fold up into myself, my body a ball of pain. I heard animal snarls coming from Pamela and knew she was now a wolf. The magic mirror’s high-pitched keening returned.
I felt the wards burst out of Nash and flow back into the walls, all of them, doubled in strength. And with them the curse, twice as strong as before, clinging to our wards and permeating the building. The candles we’d lit died at the same time, leaving us in absolute darkness.
“Damn.” Cassandra’s voice came as a weak whisper, but it held a hint of awe. “It’s a double hex.”
“AND A DOUBLE hex is . . . ?” I asked irritably about a half hour later.
We couldn’t get the candles lit again. The eight of us huddled in the dark in the lobby while rain beat down outside. Our only light was what filtered through the front windows from the floodlights on the Crossroads Bar.
Ansel hadn’t made any noise in the kitchen since Nash sucked out the wards, but the magic mirror had returned to singing. It finished
“A double hex is exactly what it sounds like,” Cassandra said. In spite of what had happened, she sounded as apathetic as ever. “Most hexes eventually wear off or weaken enough to be broken by the victim, if it doesn’t kill them soon enough. Therefore, some sorcerers take the precaution of making it a double hex—if the curse gets broken, it casts itself again, this time twice as strong. It’s tricky, and only the best sorcerers can do it.”
“Or gods,” Coyote put in. He’d remained in his human form, lying flat on the floor. He’d refused Mick’s offer of clothes, so he was stark naked. At least it was dark.
“And one of the best sorcerers is after you,” Fremont said.
Cassandra looked at me. “I told you, let me summon him and get this over with. It’s me he’s been sent to kill.”
“No summoning,” I said firmly. “We aren’t in any shape to defend ourselves, and like I said, there’s nothing to say the ununculous won’t try to kill the rest of us for the hell of it.”
“What do we do, then?” Fremont asked. “Sit here and wait for him?”
“No, we keep trying to break the hex,” I said. “Every sorcerer has a weakness. We need to find his.”
“Sage words, Stormwalker.” Pamela’s voice was bestial and odd.
She’d gotten stuck in the form between wolf and human and looked like something from a horror movie. Pamela’s face was wolf. She had the limbs of a human covered in wolf fur, a tail, and two complete sets of breasts, human and wolf. She sat with her back against the couch and held Cassandra, who didn’t seem to mind that her girlfriend was now a nightmare beast.
I’d made Mick sit close to Nash, hoping Nash’s strange canceling effect would keep Mick’s need to become dragon at bay. I also needed Nash’s now-increased dampening field to keep my own magic quiet. The storm magic was at least calming as the lightning moved off, though I still had urges to grab the rain and sweep it in through the windows. The Beneath magic, though, kept wanting to come out and play. If I lost control of that, everyone here could die.
I actually did have a plan, one I didn’t bother mentioning, especially not to Mick. If Mick knew what I had in mind, he’d simply lock me in the basement and secure the door with dragon fire. But once I had everyone busy working out the ununculous’s weakness, I would sneak away, call the ununculous myself, and face him alone. The way my Beneath magic was raging, I could kill the bastard with one blow, and I would.
I felt Coyote looking at me. Hard at me, his eyes glittering in the darkness.
Damn it, he wasn’t telepathic. And yet Coyote always did seem to know what I was thinking. I remembered what he’d said about me ripping open vortexes if I tried to fight the curse or the sorcerer, but I saw no other way. Anyway, I didn’t plan to
I returned Coyote’s stare with a determined one of my own before asking Pamela, “How did you know something was wrong here? Did you see my fire?”
“No.” Pamela’s voice was thick. “Cassandra didn’t come home, and then I saw your bartender at the gas station. He told me the hotel was shut down and dark, and he didn’t know why. I came up here, but I couldn’t get
