Demonkeepers

Shandi’s rejection was an almost physical slap, one that left Jade pressing a hand to her lurching stomach as the door swung shut at the winikin’s back. Gods, she hated fighting. And if more than once along the line she’d thought she could deal with Shandi if she only knew what the winikin’s problem was, she’d been way off on that one. Knowing the winikin’s history only made things worse by slapping her upside the head with the reality she’d long avoided: Her winikin didn’t just not love her; she actively resented her, and blamed her—rightly or not—for the deaths of the people she had loved.

And oh, holy hell, that sucked.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Jade whispered, finding a kernel of frustration amidst the sickening dismay. “I didn’t pick her as my winikin, and I didn’t force her to choose me over them. The magic might have, but I’m not the magic. I shouldn’t be blamed for it.” Unfortunately, knowing that she had a valid point didn’t do anything to smooth over the raw, ragged edges.

The counselor’s cool was long gone. Jade took brief satisfaction in imagining a cartoon version of herself, red faced, with steam coming out of her ears, but that was still a woefully inadequate outlet for the churned-up feelings inside her. For the first time since completing the rudimentary firearms training course all the magi had gone through when they had first come to Skywatch, she was tempted to head down to the firing range and shoot the crap out of some targets. She hadn’t been all that great a shot, but a pump-action shotgun loaded with jadeshot required approximately the finesse of spray paint. Point and shoot she could do, she thought, as long as she didn’t try one of Michael’s advanced training runs, which featured moving targets and good guys standing next to bad. Bull’s-eyes she could handle. She would go shoot some stationary targets. That’d make her feel better, she thought, or at least allow her to burn off some steam.

Pleased to have a plan of sorts, even one that was uncharacteristically violent, she made a quick circuit of the archive to put away the few things that were out of place. She was suddenly buzzed to get going; she wanted the thud of recoil, the tearing of paper targets. Hurrying now, her skull throbbing with a headache that was rapidly turning to a rattling, humming whine, she reached to grab the Idiot’s Guide, which lay on the conference table where she had dropped it.

It was still open to the fireball spell. Her eyes skimmed over the glyphs as she moved to shut the book. And she froze.

On the page, the glyphs began to glow, radiating off the page and drifting toward her, outlined not in ink, but in bright red-gold fluorescence against a sudden backdrop of blurred images. She gaped as two of the glyphs shimmered and morphed, becoming entirely different syllables in the phonetic system. The humming whine became a song, and the buzz of anger in her blood suddenly felt like . . . magic.

Abruptly, the red-gold, almost holographic writing flared brightly, then disappeared, but the afterimage stayed imprinted in her brain. The air had gone strangely cold.

She mouthed the syllables and felt something wrench inside her. A tingling sensation flared from her center to her extremities and then reversed course, fleeing back up her arms and into her body, leaving her chilled. Breathing hard, unable to get enough oxygen, she looked around wildly, but nothing had changed in the shelf-lined room. Nothing but the syllables that danced in her mind’s eye.

Cool heat spun inside her; the spell hovered at the edges of her mind, tempting her. Daring her. Mad euphoria gripped her as something deep inside whispered, Try it. What have you got to lose?

Leaving the book where it lay, she held her lightly scarred palms out in front of her, making it look as if she were cupping an imaginary basketball, as she’d seen the warriors do when she’d watched them practice their fighting magic and pretended she didn’t mind being on the sidelines. Then, halfway convinced that nothing at all was going to happen, she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and recited the spell aloud.

Magic detonated within her, ripping a scream from her throat, more from surprise than pain. The air shimmered between her outstretched hands, and then blinding blue-white flashed simultaneously with a crackling roar that was like being inside a clap of thunder. On the heels of the flash-boom, a shock wave hammered away from her, sending her staggering back as the archive door exploded. Cold seared across her skin, a frigidity so intense that she couldn’t tell if it was fire or ice; she knew only that it burned. She heard crashes and shouts in the hallway and main mansion, then a second huge detonation that rocked the whole damn building, even the reinforced security of the archive.

As quickly as it had come, the magic drained from her in a rush. The noise quieted. Or rather, the noise of the immediate destruction died down, to be replaced with shouts of alarm and tersely snapped orders as the warriors prepared to man a defense.

Oh, shit, Jade thought on a spurt of horrified adrenaline. They think we’re under attack! She had to get out there and explain, but she couldn’t move. She was frozen in place, not by the magic or shock now, but by the sight of the crazy, misplaced winter wonderland that surrounded her.

She hadn’t created a fireball. She had summoned ice.

The walls, floor, ceiling, bookcases, and every other damn thing that had been to the sides or behind her when she’d recited the spell were covered in a thick layer of furry white frost, as though the whole room had been stuck in a giant freezer that had missed out on the past fifty years of frost- free technology. In front of her, where her inadvertent and out-of-control . . . iceball, she supposed, had exploded away from her, the door was gone, along with most of the wall. In their place were sheets of ice and drifts of frosty snow that extended far out into the hallway. The opposite wall was frost-

crazed, the windows cracked from the quick war between the heat outside and the insta- freeze within.

And, as far as she could tell, the snow and ice kept going on down the hallway. She was pretty sure that last big detonation had come from the great room.

“Oh, gods,” she moaned. What if she had hurt someone? Yanking herself from her paralysis, she bolted out of the archive, slipped on a wide patch of ice just outside the door, and went down on her knees. Water soaked through her jeans almost immediately; the frost layer was already melting, saturating the walls and floor and dripping from the ceiling.

“Jade!” It was Sasha’s voice, relieved. Armed with a submachine gun she held with easy familiarity, she was partway up the hall, slipping and slithering as she followed the ice trail to its source. “What happened? Was it Iago?”

Jade’s legs gave out on her at that, and she found herself sitting in a puddle of meltwater, gaping as the Nightkeepers charged up the hallway toward her, most of them armed, all of them coming to defend Skywatch against . . . her. She started to laugh, tried to swallow it, and ended up emitting a ridiculous hiccup that had Sasha’s expression going to one of pure worry.

Before her friend could go into healer mode, Jade waved to fend her off. “No, I’m fine, really.

Better than fine. I’m sorry about the door, though. And the walls. And the windows.” She looked around her at the growing melt, cringing at the destruction, then, when she remembered what the archive had looked like, wailed, “And the books!” They were all scanned into the digital system, but still.

“Jade!” Michael gripped her shoulder and gave her a none-too-gentle shake. “Was Iago here? Did something happen with one of the artifacts?”

“No.” The hysterical laughter threatened to burble up again. “Something happened with me. I did it, all of it. I finally wrote a spell. Or manipulated it, at least.” As she watched, a huge blob of slush let go of the ceiling and fell down the back of Michael’s neck.

“Gah!” He straightened abruptly, pawing at his nape, then scowled when the others laughed at him.

He glared around. “Can we get out of here and continue this someplace dry?”

“I’d suggest the great room,” a new voice broke in, “but the furniture’s gone . . . along with most of the floor, and what looks like part of the gym downstairs.” Strike made his way through the crowd.

Dressed in full black-on-black combat gear and wearing a loaded weapons belt, he was even more intimidating than usual. He glared around, not immediately locking on Jade. “What in the hell is going on here? We have rules about experimenting, you know. As in fucking don’t unless you’re in the training hall, where you can’t destroy too much