“Beast, that was a good trick, but I think I’m going to need to see it done again before I’m sure about trying it,” I shouted gazing around the frozen landscape.
“Just once more?” Beast growled.
“Don’t be smart; I can do it if I see it done once more.”
“As you wish,” he replied.
A portal opened in front of us and I could see Joe’s cabin through the shimmering opening between the worlds.
I nodded more to myself than to anyone else. I did see what he had done, and I believed I could duplicate the feat. “Thanks now close it before it collapses on itself.”
Portals are not capable of existing for any length of time. You open one when you need it, and you have time to get through it without rushing, but you can’t dawdle. Nature doesn’t like having a hole torn between dimensions, and it will slam the portal shut before anything untoward happens. When you open one at different air pressures, the wind can be furious, and if nature didn’t close the rip, the pressures would continue to try and equalize. I wasn’t sure what the end result would be, I’d never seen one at different pressures that lasted more than a dozen seconds.
As the portal winked out of existence, I looked around for where I wanted to open one. The place should have been obvious. With magic’s issues with flowing water, I needed to be careful or the river would cancel out my portal as soon as it opened.
“So what now?” Tess asked.
“I’m going to try to open a portal from here to there,” I said indicating a spot not more than one hundred yards farther down the river.
She followed my gaze and then shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“Me either,” growled Beast. “I can walk there as fast as you can open the portal.”
“It’s not about moving to that spot, it’s a proof of concept.” I flipped a leg over Beast’s neck and slid down his left side.
“What’s the concept you’re going to prove, that you can do it?” Tess asked as she joined me in front of Beast and Maia.
“Exactly,” I said and popped the cork from my little bottle of salt. I tossed it in the air and spoke the proper spell. The salt fell into a circle surrounding all four of us. I held out a hand to my apprentice. “Mesh with me.”
She took my left hand in her right and in a few seconds, I felt her aura, emotions, and thoughts merging with mine.
“Now what?” Tess asked.
“Hush and pay attention. We’re doing this together so that you can learn what I’m doing. Like everything else I’ve shown you, someday you may have need of the technique.”
“I’m always ready to learn a new spell,” Tess said.
She was anxious to learn, but I hadn’t even taught her to open a portal yet, much less an attempt to teach her something I hadn’t even tried out yet. Oh, well, as my father used to say, “You can’t learn no younger.” His use of improper English was an accent on the statement. His grammar had always been better than mine.
Together we activated the circle around us while I triggered my senses tat. Now we could both see the flickering shield of energy that surrounded the four of us.
I concentrated on the location a few hundred feet downriver and then on a spot a dozen or so feet in front of us. I could feel Tess’s growing surprise as she realized where I was setting the portal.
With a soft snap, the spell completed and for a second I felt the enormous energy that was flowing through the portal. I dropped to one knee in a sudden burst of weakness. I had not expected this. Normal portals took almost no energy to open and move through, but this one was sucking the energy from my body at a prodigious rate. I tapped the nearest ley line and a moment later felt energy pouring back into me as Tess shared her stored energy with me. Together we were able to hold the portal open, but as soon as it was stable, I canceled the spell.
“Whew! That was freaky. I’ve never seen a spell affect you like that,” Tess said as she pulled me back to my feet.
I grinned. “I wasn’t expecting the drain. I think I’ll be able to handle it better now that I know what to expect.”
Beast growled something under his breath.
“What was that?” I asked. “If you have a comment, just speak up.”
“You’re messing with great power. Are you sure you want to attempt this?”
Maia screeched and shook her head. “Beast is right. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It looks dangerous.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Just another application of what Beast just accomplished with the portal that got us here.”
“They aren’t wrong, Rafe,” Tess said. “The energy sucked out of you too fast. I could see age lines appearing on your face in seconds.”
I shrugged. “Cost of doing business. I’m fine now.”
I was good. My energy was returning to normal as Tess and my taps on the ley line replenished the life energy I’d used in forming the portal.
“But will you have time to use it in a fight? It took you at least five seconds to cast that spell. You keep telling me that a Wanderer’s greatest power in a fight comes from the ability to trigger our tattoos in an instance, not five seconds. Will you have enough time to accomplish it?”
I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Chapter 21
Raphael
We were back at Joe’s for supper. Even in the dark, his cabin was easy to find. The Shrine of the Sun was well lit at night and was only a few hundred feet farther up the mountain above Joe’s cabin. Tess and I had picked up the makings for spaghetti, and I was watching the pasta boil while Tess finished mixing all of the ingredients for
