CHAPTER 8
“Joanie?” Billy stepped back through the barrier as if it wasn’t there. I leaned harder on it, prodding at it with my hands and trying to do the same with my mind. It failed miserably. I did not think of my mind as a poking instrument. There was no scalpellike wit here, no sharp-as-a-knife insights. Nor could I come up with a car analogy that would let me slide through the wall. Cars and walls, in my experience, smashed together, not phased through one another. Not that I’d ever smashed up a car myself. Petite was the only vehicle I’d ever owned and I’d have killed myself before running her into anything.
“Joanie?” Billy asked again. I took my hand off the wall, my nerve quieting as soon as I broke the contact.
“I can’t get through.” Obviously. “He put up some kind of firewall.”
“A firewall.”
“Yeah, you know. To keep unfriendlies out of your computer network?”
“I know what a firewall is, Joanie. I’m just questioning your usage. How come it let me through, if it’s a firewall?”
I lifted my eyebrows at him. “It doesn’t recognize you as an unfriendly. It’s programmed for me.” It was a lot easier to think in terms of computer protocols than magic. I thought I might be on to something here.
“Right. So can you still do the thing you were going to do?”
I pursed my lips and looked through the invisible barrier. “One way to find out.” The core of power in me was waking up, the wall providing some kind of challenge it felt ready to stand up to. I was pretty sure it was a false high, but I was willing to take it.
“Last time I did this,” I said, more to myself than Billy, “it didn’t actually do a damned bit of good.”
“You’re older, wiser, and stronger now.” There was an unexpected resonance to Billy’s voice, a depth of faith that I knew full well I didn’t deserve. Still, it made me straighten my shoulders and drag in a deep breath of cold air. I closed my eyes momentarily, feeling the steam from my breath beading into water on my eyelashes.
When I opened them again, I wasn’t quite in my own body anymore. The core of silver-blue energy was alive inside me, pushing me out as though there wasn’t enough room for the two of us in this town. For a moment I felt like I was being given a gift I didn’t really deserve: I hadn’t done any of the training Coyote thought I should, and I wasn’t sure I ought to be able to slip out of my body so easily.
The flip side to that, equally frightening, was that if I could do it without any training, then maybe he was right, and it really was something I should be doing with my life. I didn’t like that possibility any better at all.
Right in front of me, the Blade’s firewall glimmered dark red, like blood seeping out from the heart of the world. It cut off my ability to see anything inside it with more than ordinary eyes. I turned my head very slowly, unsure if my body was doing the same thing, but afraid to move too quickly for fear of jarring myself out of the double vision. Beyond the firewall, the world was full of neon colors, pulses of life that looked like a kid with fingerpaints had gone wild. Billy was just to my right, a swirling ball of orange and fuchsia energy held in his hands. I whispered, “Thanks,” and though I was pretty sure I hadn’t said it out loud, he crooked a grin and nodded his head once in acknowledgment. I reached out for his colors, calling them to me as politely as I could. They leaped out of his hands, whirling together like agitated kittens, and spun into the silver and blue core of me.
I felt, instantly, a dozen times stronger. My mind cleared, focus spilling through my limbs as if the blood had just remembered that it was supposed to be running. I didn’t expect the sudden boost in clarity. It suggested my power really hadn’t recovered from the run-in with the Blade that morning. Or almost thirty years ago. Whichever. The point was, if Billy’s energy was bringing the world into that much sharper relief, I was even more tapped than I’d thought.
Buoyed by his dancing fuchsia and brilliant orange, I spread my hands, sending tentacles of power darting over the Blade’s shield. Silver slithered over red, trailing my and Billy’s colors like banners, testing and tracing the barrier. I went up, not around, looking for weak points that would allow me to hack into the system.
Giggling while out of body was an interesting experience. It felt like champagne bubbles in my nose and fingertips, little sparkles of glee that didn’t require containment.
As if in response to my laughter, the red wall faltered.
My giggles cut off as I jumped to take advantage of the weakness, a thin spot in the barrier that began to strengthen again even as I slid threads of power into it. I envisioned taloned nails that could grasp and tear more efficiently than my own, and worried at the spot like a determined rodent. I found myself grinning again, wondering what Coyote would think of me throwing over the car analogy in favor of using psychic rats to claw my way through a magical firewall. Even as I grinned, a silver tendril punched its way through the wall. Other colors, Billy’s and mine both, leaped to the spot, squirming through and braiding together to strengthen each other without ever blending or losing any of their own distinctive coherence.
My hands lifted of their own accord, making claws that wrenched apart from one another, as though prying open a bear trap. The wall above me groaned and then tore, great jagged chunks ripping free with the same metal-on-metal shrieks I’d encountered that morning.
I was abruptly very cold, sweat standing out on my face and beading into my eyes. A dispassionate part of my mind suggested shock? and for a dizzying moment I considered stopping before I found myself facefirst in a snowbank, dying of exposure. The power I was using gasped and shriveled, the jaws I’d forced open in the red wall beginning to crash shut again. My knees gave out and I dropped to the snow. The chill helped me focus, and I used the energy that had been keeping me on my feet to try to keep the wall torn asunder. It had life of its own, forced and vicious, with no purpose beyond keeping me out. Destroying me, if it could.
And it was going to. I crumpled farther into the snow, pressure bearing down on my weakening breach in the wall like so much newspaper. I knotted my fingers in snow, feeling icy chunks bite into the lines of my un- gloved hand and then melt into bone-aching cold. I was going to be pulverized by someone who wasn’t even there. What an embarrassing way to die.
At least Morrison wasn’t there to see it. For a moment I went in a mental circle, annoyed that that was my last thought, then realizing it couldn’t be, because this was my last thought—
Power slammed into me, drawn from a depth that I could barely fathom. Deep purple, burnt sienna—Billy’s colors, but at their most profound. I could feel the love he drew on, lacing his colors with such gladness I was happy to stop breathing, so long as I could do it for them—
I didn’t come to my feet. My body was irrelevant, left behind as I sprang forward on the force of the power Billy gave to me, unstinting. I slammed my fingers, all swirled with dominant purple, into the barely existent crack—all that was left of my opening in the wall—and tore it apart.
Redness shattered all around me, breaking in huge chunks of raw-edged power that collapsed into fragments as they hit the ground. I boiled through the opening and stood against the waves of blood rage that had gone into the killings. The bodies were gone, but the black power that linked one woman to another was still there, seeped in the earth beneath the snow like their blood. I could see lines that hadn’t been there the day before—or that I hadn’t been strong enough to see. Billy’s outpouring of energy made my skin tingle, even if I’d left my actual body behind.
He can’t keep this up forever, Joanne. Stop fucking around. Did other people have little voices in their heads that said things like that? I could stretch myself out a little and touch a hundred thousand minds in Seattle just to find out, but I was afraid the answer would be no. I refrained, instead focusing on the thin lines rising up from each of the three points where the women had died.
They came together in thready blackness, like oil-smeared string that glimmered and twisted with unhealthy light, making three points of a pyramid. They joined at the apex and braided together, reaching higher until the braid grew watery and distant. I could see it cut through the clouds and into the blueness of the sky beyond, but it faded before it reached the dark curve of space above the world. I was almost certain it faded, not that my vision was failing. The power diamond wasn’t complete. The Blade needed one more body to finish building his stairway to heaven. That was the good news.
The bad news was it obviously didn’t matter that the bodies themselves were gone. The power their deaths had bought was there, seared into the ground. Taking the three women away from the park hadn’t broken the spell, and I wasn’t sure what would.
