The knife was imbedded in the meaty flesh of her shoulder.
“Christian.” His eyes flicked up. Raquel was staring at him, her gaze aware, focused on him and tight with pain. “Oh, God. What happened?”
“Stay still.” He fumbled for his phone. The blood on his fingers made him nearly drop it on the floor. He hit dial and held it to his ear.
Raquel tried to get up. “The fault, I can feel it unraveling. You have to take me there.”
“You have a knife in your chest.” He pushed her back down as Grace answered. “I need Alan. Now.”
Raquel closed her eyes. She’d fucked up bad. The runes had worked spectacularly well. Tapping into her power wasn’t like turning a spigot, it was like taking a sledgehammer to it. It had settled down somewhat, but the wall was gone. For good she imagined. She’d flooded power into the unstable portal though, and now...she could feel it, unraveling at the seam, drawing further and further apart with every breath.
If she could get to the fault line, she might be able to fix this. No. She
His expression was hard. There was anger there and fear, which was only to be expected considering the fact that she was single-handedly destroying his town. The concern surprised her.
“I did this. I’m so sorry.”
He nodded but brushed the hair from her face. “We’ll talk about it later.”
There was a knife in her chest. She could see the hilt sticking out, feel the coldness of it in her bones along with a razor-edged pain.
“Julian did that,” Christian said, eyes flicking to a spot behind her. She’d have to crane her neck to see. “You were in some sort of trance.”
She remembered spinning out of control and then all of her power contracting back to face a sudden threat. It was what had let her get the upper hand in that terrible struggle. Pain was a powerful focus. “Thank you, Julian.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you, Raquel.” She heard tears in the boy’s voice.
“You did what you had to do. You saved everyone. A few more minutes and the fault might have ruptured.”
Christian paled, but it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Even now, with her power contained, the fault was dangerously unstable. “You did good, Julian.”
She must have blacked out for a second or two because the next thing she knew, Alan hovered over her, arguing with Kathy. Quite possibly she was hallucinating.
“Kathy?”
Kathy turned her head. “I came as soon as Grace called.” She frowned. “You broke through your block and nearly tore a hole between worlds.”
“Get me to the fault and I’ll fix it.”
Kathy nodded. “I’ll get you there.”
Alan let out an exasperated sigh. “Two minutes and I can stop the bleeding. We’ll repair the muscle and nerve damage later. That’s the best I can do.”
Christian nodded tightly at the doctor and held Raquel while they withdrew the knife. Heat flooded onto her chest and burned down her arm. Alan pressed his hand to her forehead and Raquel heard his voice whispering inside her head. When she opened her eyes again, they were in a truck and she was propped up against Kathy, whose arm was locked across her chest. It was a bumpy road and every rut they hit jolted through her like an electric shock.
“We’re almost there. We’re driving in as far as we can.”
Kind of them to spare her the horse. The truck shuddered, bucked twice and then stalled. Magic had that effect on mechanics sometimes. Christian swore loudly and then she heard him on his phone. “We’re at the edge of the north field where you butt up against Richter’s land. Yeah. She says she can do it.” A pause. “Hurry then.”
The door beside her opened and Christian was there, grunting as he hefted her into his arms. “You sure you’re up for this?”
She had to be. “Yes.”
But she needn’t have bothered answering. He was already walking across the field toward the fault, his long strides eating up the ground. There was a mess of stars tonight. She could pick out the Northern Cross and Orion’s Belt without even trying. Christian’s boots crunched over the frosted earth and blended in with the staccato beat of an approaching horse.
“She’s injured?” Aiden—the man who would likely kill her for destroying his town when this was through. Justifiably so.
“Alan stopped the bleeding. She’s lost a good deal of blood, but she’s conscious.”
Aiden settled her across his lap and gave her a skeptical look. “The block?”
“Gone.”
And they were off. He went for speed rather than comfort and it was all she could do to hold on. He might be the Odin, but his horse was no Sleipnir flying through the air. Hooves hit the packed earth with magnificent enthusiasm that pounded through her body with every step. She clung to Aiden’s shirt and didn’t look up until she felt the fault. A bloody rip in the fabric of space. It never felt pretty, like a new scar, sealed but vulnerable. Now it was a raw and open wound oozing magic into the night. And surrounded by demons. She felt their magic too. Heard the snarls of the hounds as they slaughtered the ones brave enough to cross through. Her eyes sought Fen and found him almost immediately. She couldn’t say how she knew which hound was him, she simply knew. Some of the tension eased in her chest. Seeing him there, crouched and snarling over his injured pack mate, gave her the courage to look at the damage she’d done to the portal.
Aiden drew his sword. “How close do you need to be?”
She glanced around and pointed near a tree, slightly raised and less than dozen feet from the open portal. He trampled a demon to get her there and then lowered her to the earth.
“I’ll stand guard,” he snapped. “Make it quick.”
She’d done this. Her gaze swept the small clearing littered with the bodies of demons. Moonlight cut through the trees, casting shifting patterns of silver and black. About a half-dozen demons still lived, blood burning red beneath slick gray skin. The hounds had them cornered to the fault, the huntsmen stood behind the hounds in case any slipped through their circle, swords at the ready. The men and women of the hunt looked exhausted. Some of them were wounded but still sat in their saddles. All of them were covered in gore and blood. They wore old armor of leather and chain and their Skimstrok blades reacted to the magic in the air, glowing with a soft blue light.
A surge usually meant a handful of demons, not dozens. Kathy had brought her to watch their hunt in action. She’d always said that a witch needed to understand the sacred trust placed in her by the clan. The magic was their first line of defense. Monitoring the faults to be sure that enough magic seeped through from their home planet to enable them to survive here. Ensuring that the fault didn’t open enough to allow the demons the opportunity to cross freely. The hunt was the second line of protection, their work minimal with a stable fault. Raquel had not only failed these people horribly, she’d actively sabotaged by them by not being able to control her gift and taking a risk she’d stupidly thought would only affect her.
She’d screwed up badly.
Shame filled her but she choked it down, trying to focus on the task at hand. She blocked out the snarls of the demons and hounds, the pain radiating from her shoulder, the ache in her limp and useless arm to focus on the fault itself.
The wards they’d been so worried about had held through the chaos and were only now beginning to falter. The fault was a slit in space. The ancients had called these fleeting connections between the worlds bridges and could open and close them at will. The descendants of the ?sir who’d fled Asgard were not as powerful, weakened by the lack of magic here or their interbreeding with the human population. Whatever the cause, ?sir nowadays could only open portals at the weak spots in the fabric of space such as the one that ran through this land.
Their presence weakened the fault, allowing these portals to open spontaneously during the times when the
