“Dad?” the boy said. “They’re coming. Hi, Ballard.”
“Who, son?” Joey asked, looking around.
“Bad men,” the boy said. “Real bad men.” I opened my Ajna, my third eye and I sensed them too.
“The Dugpa,” I said to Joey. “Coming from the beach.” I knelt by Garland and unwrapped Caern’s purple quartz bracelet from my wrist. I put it around the boy’s neck, like a choker. “Garland, this was your mamma’s, and her mamma’s before that. It’s from Faerie, did your mom tell you about the First World?” He nodded as he examined the jewelry. “It’s powerful,” I said. “It will hide you from hollow men, from bad people looking for you with the sight, what you and your mamma have. Never take it off, you hear me, you never take this away from your skin, and you stick close to your dad.” The boy looked at me with large, wise eyes and nodded. They were Caern’s eyes. I stood and turned to Joey. “You two get in the house. Hide.”
“You’ll need help,” he said.
“That shotgun won’t make a difference,” I said. “Your son needs you. If anything happens to me, Garland will know. If it does, you make a run for the car. Get the fuck out of the country and do it fast, y’hear?”
Joey nodded and led his son toward the back door of the dark house. The boy looked back at me and then they both disappeared inside. I cleared the cobwebs of pain and fear from my body with some cleansing breaths and ran toward the beach down the old worn path through the stand of trees. I cleared the tree line and found myself at the edge of the rocky cliff. There were old, worn, concrete stairs with rusted metal rails that led down to the rocky beach below. The moon was hidden behind clouds and I could sense that will had placed those clouds there, so I brushed them aside.
“Iam celare, tacere sororis,” I whispered, and the bright, pilfered light of the moon came out of hiding and illuminated the sea and the beach. There were six men. They had landed in a large rubber raft with a muffled outboard motor on it. The raft had been dragged onto the land. All the men wore black tactical gear, black ski masks, and night-vision goggles that made them look vaguely insect-like as they spread across the beach, moving toward the cliff face and the stairs. They were all armed. A second raft, with six more assassins, was closing with the shore.
As the accusing moonlight pinned them, I pulled energy from the air, sifting it through my seething Muladhara lens and gestured downward as the waters roughened and the dark clouds swirled. “Ignis caeli ardebit inimicos meos,” I called up to the winds, even as the men heard me and raised their weapons. Lightning, like an angry serpent, crashed down from the sky. It struck and killed two of the men, tossing their bodies into the air. I felt another’s magic deflect my lightning and send it dancing across the now-choppy ocean until it dispersed.
“Shit” was all I had time to say as I scrambled back away from the edge of the cliff, toward the trees. There was a hiss and whine of angry bullets as the surviving killers and the landing occupants of the second raft fired their silenced weapons up the cliff at me. I felt a hot iron burn itself into my shoulder with the force of a freight train. I fell back onto the ground from the shot. Before I had time to regroup, I felt the mystical attack on top of me. Foul, poisoned Manipura-driven force engulfed me and tried to smother me, snuff out my life force. It was brazen, reckless magic driven by a level of power I had seldom encountered in a mortal magician. My first instinct was an animal one, to shake myself loose, but I quickly sensed, as my lungs began to seize, that was exactly what my opponent wanted me to do, and the spell coiled tighter about my aura, like a massive python of black cracking energy.
I was on the ground struggling to breathe, to stay conscious, and I knew the Dugpa’s assassins were hustling up the stairs while their patron kept me busy. I had less than a minute until they could pump my twitching body full of bullets and then move against Joey and Garland. No. That was not going to happen, damn it.
I forced my body, my instincts, to shut the fuck up. I accepted the spell, its twisted harmony, its mad entropy. I let the monster play, if it killed me it killed me; if this was my last breath, then it was. There was no future, no “next,” there was pure crystalline breath, the mind of the infinite, the sun, radiating from my core.
The coils of the spell loosened. I was water, I became my Svadhisthana chakra; pure life force; pure, clean, fluid, slowly eroding the hungry, insistent magic wanting to devour me. I let it devour me and in doing so I devoured it. I slipped loose from the spell. It was a hell of a trap, and it had been built just for me. My life force, my soul was my weakest spot, and the last thing I would have ever relied on to overcome such an attack. Another few seconds of resisting and I’d be dead. As it was, I was feeling pretty rough as I crouched. I saw the masked face of the first Dugpa to reach the top of the stairs. I let the monster slither away and guided it
