attempt at healing Mark had lit a path for it to follow, and it’d done so without hesitation or compunction. I had the sense that each time I built this sort of link to another person, it gave my enemy strength to draw from, a new route for it to take. I had a sudden awful concern for Ashley Hampton, but worry disappeared again under trying to untangle what my opponent had wrought.
Because it had just driven its own host into deep slumber. I felt Mark’s breathing change, both from inside where I was caught, and from outside where I was sitting on him. Butterflies whirled around me in obvious agitation, their rapid-beating wings making rainbows that danced in the corners of my vision. For the first time I got a feeling for Mark’s own aura, and realized I hadn’t even known I wasn’t seeing it. His was rusty-brown, so flattened that most of the red had been pulled from it. I thought it ought to be warm and friendly with life, but the butterfly colors had ridden it so long it was like he’d lost the ability to recognize himself at all. Standing inside the darkened garden that represented his soul, I felt energy draining out of it, sapped through uncountable needle-fine points. The trees and grasses and bushes in his garden were hole-ridden, as if it’d been attacked by voracious insects that neither knew nor cared that their feasting would ultimately destroy their food source and themselves.
Cold shocked through me, making hairs stand up all over my body.
Standing there in the midst of a butterfly storm, my hands clenched and cold anger built up inside me. Not on my watch. I actually spoke the words out loud, then tilted my head up and shouted them into the sky: “Not on my watch, do you hear me, Goddamn it? Not again! Nobody else!
As if I’d thrown a challenge into my opponent’s teeth, half the colors of the rainbow bled down from above, butterflies by their thousands coming to feed off the sheer raw anger I flung out. I felt safe in drawing them to me: as long as Mark slept I thought they couldn’t escape the confines of his garden, which left the link to Morrison untouchable. That I wasn’t sure how
Rust under paint. In a way, that’s what this thing was, rust encroaching on the metal beneath a vehicle’s painted surface. It could be sanded out, replacement sheets soldered in and polished up, and with a professional job, the car’d be good as new. Mark’s soul needed replenishing and some TLC, but first the damage had to be excised.
I met the onslaught of butterflies with a belt sander. There was something particularly awful about that image if I let myself think about it too hard. Working with the idea of damaged paint was easier, since it didn’t involve delicate beautiful bugs being turned into so much ichor and smeared all over the place. Those that had already landed on my skin dissolved into fine mist, like paint drifting in the air, and I tried not to breathe too deeply at first.
Then I thought better the connection be in me than in Mark, and inhaled sharply, sparks of an otherworldly power crashing into me. Every breath I took replenished me enough to keep pouring power out, and the dark swarm of hungry butterflies kept coming to it, rather literally like moth to flame. The more I took in, the more distinctly I felt
I would just have to hold my ground and drag it out into the real world somehow. It had so much strength, so much weight to it, that I thought I might be able to. I’d brought an immortal child across worlds once, and a demon after that. There was no reason I couldn’t pull it off a third time.
Except those other two had been willing to go, and I wasn’t sure this thing was. I pushed the thought aside with an audible sniff, as if contempt for the details would make them go away.
By that time my whole body was buzzing from running a belt sander over my own skin. My own power was its usual burnished silver-blue, now gleaming over the rainbows of magic I’d obliterated with my psychic belt sander. The colors gleamed as if in defiance or mockery of the prophecy that had gotten me here, and the endless attack of fluttering creatures began to slow. I felt full up of power, like butterfly wings might lift me up from within and carry me away.
Beyond me, the pinprick holes that damaged Mark’s garden were healing, green returning to grayed-out leaves, blue fading back into a pale sky. With the butterflies focused on me, he had a chance. That was all I asked for. Triumphant, I turned my focus back on myself, looking for a way to seal the multi-winged dark power inside me long enough to wake up again.
Barbara, wreathed in red and yellow and violet flame, stepped into the garden of Mark’s soul just as I was about to sever the link, and pulled all the magic I’d stolen from my adversary to herself.
CHAPTER 31
I gasped, wrenching my eyes open, and to my surprise they did open, leaving me awake and breathless and still sitting on Mark’s chest. His nose was no longer mashed in, and Barbara was nowhere to be seen. I got up, the change in pressure reminding me I’d just been hit on the head, and dialed 911 on my way out the door. An ambulance would have to pick up my snoozing paramour. I had to find Barb.
Which would be a lot easier if she would stop running away from me. I gave the emergency services people the address Mark was staying at and climbed into Petite, gnawing on my cell phone. Not that I could blame her for running away: except for the pruning shears thing, I was pretty much on top of things physically. She wasn’t exactly the sort of person who could beat the tar out of me. Keeping the fight from me was the smartest thing she could do.
I straightened up so fast I hit my head on Petite’s roof and said, “Shit!” both because it hurt and because wisdom had fallen down on me like a load of bricks. I pulled out of the parking lot and dialed Gary, telling myself I was grounded from driving for another week.
He wasn’t home. At least, he wasn’t at my home. I whacked the phone against the steering wheel a few times, like it was its fault, and tried calling him at his house. No answer there, either. He’d said he’d be there.
I whispered, “Shit,” one more time, this time with worry. The topaz should be protecting him. He couldn’t have gone to sleep. Then again, I didn’t think Mark would’ve been a potential victim, either, so what the hell did I know?
There were absolutely no cops on the roads. I hoped it was just because I was getting lucky this morning, not because the wave of sleeping sickness had gone beyond the North Precinct and was starting to overtake Seattle. Given the general lack of vehicles at seven in the morning on a Thursday, though, I thought I was probably pipe dreaming. I got home and pounded up the stairs, afraid of what I’d see.
What I saw was an empty apartment with a box of two-day-old doughnuts on the kitchen table. I said something unladylike and ate the last two doughnuts, too hungry to care if they were stale. I couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch the day before. Or breakfast. I knew I hadn’t had dinner. The second half of the last doughnut stuffed in my cheek, I called Gary’s house again, still getting no answer. He didn’t have voice mail or an answering machine, on the logic that if it was important, they’d call back. He was right, but that didn’t do me any good when I wanted to rant worriedly at him.
Which was probably exactly how he’d felt when I’d run off last night and hadn’t called until this morning. Properly chastised, I went and sat at my computer, desperate for a little research on butterflies and nightmares.
Half a minute later I was scrubbing my eyeballs with my fingertips after clicking through to a pair of DVDs that came up with those words in the title. Never once in my life did I suspect butterfly nightmares might be just the ticket for determining just how much of a prude I really was. I tried a second search, using the ill-advised combination of “butterfly dream,” and really should have expected the innumerable Chuang Tsu hits. At least they weren’t brain-scrubbing. It took another couple minutes to find anything something useful.
