“What’s that do?” Cris asked.
“It calls Beast, if he’s close enough to hear. Otherwise we’re going to get wet,” I said with another grin.
“What’s so damn amusing?” Cris asked.
“Nothing really. I just wish I’d taught Tess the levitation spell. Maybe next time.”
“There’s Maia,” Tess said suddenly as she pointed to the west.
“And Beast?” I asked, but I could already see him rising from the forest below Maia.
I judged the distance between them and us. They weren’t going to get here before we hit the water. I put an arm around Cris, pulling her to me.
“Tess, join us,” I said.
We were all standing close at the bottom of Tess’s shield, but for my next trick, we needed to be very close.
Tess slung her crossbow and slid into us until we all had arms around each other.
“Okay, but is this going to keep us from getting wet?” Tess asked.
I was surprised at her. As long as she kept power in her shield, we would stay dry. The lake wasn’t moving water. Now if we’d landed in a river…
“We’ll see. Open your shield up above us; make it as wide as you can get it.”
Tess smiled and nodded. “You mean like a parachute.”
“Yep, the wider the better. Pour enough power into it to arrest our fall. It shouldn’t take too much to slow us down until Beast and Maia catch up.”
Through our link, I felt Tess concentrating on expanding her shield. As soon as it was no longer surrounding us, the wind whipped at us, threatening to separate us. The shield reformed into a dome over us and then spread out in two dimensions. Instantly, we began to slow and the wind decreased. Tess strained harder, pushing more power into her shield and it expanded until it was at least eighty feet across.
“Wow! You’re doing it,” Cris said.
A minute later, with us still more than one hundred feet above the lake’s brown water, Beast and Maia flew under us.
“What happened to you three?” Beast growled.
“We’ll explain later. Let Cris and then me drop onto your shoulders,” I ordered.
Beast maneuvered beneath us and we released our grips on Tess. Once Cris was safely aboard, I dropped down in front of her.
“Okay, now move aside and let Maia get under Tess.”
Beast dove lower and glided in a circle while Tess dropped onto Maia.
Cris slid her arms around me and hugged me. “That was wild. Now what? Are you going back?”
“Not hardly, at least not until I get my mojo back. We’ll go find that priest and see if he’ll help me.”
Cris wiggled around for a second, trying to get comfortable on Beast’s massive form. She pulled in close and laid her cheek against my left shoulder. “I’m looking forward to this,” she said into my ear.
“I’m so happy for you,” I said.
I would have preferred she remain at her home and let Tess and I go see the priest alone. Anyone around us was in danger and until I had my powers restored, I couldn’t defend her. Cris had argued that the priest would remember her and it’d make him more likely to help me. You’d think a white magic user would be willing to do anything to reverse the effect of night magic, but that wasn’t my experience. I didn’t even want to have to tell him I was a Wanderer for fear that it might sway him against helping us. But the Cyclopes had shown that leaving her behind was not an option.
Cris pulled herself tighter against me and her fingers went far lower on my belly than they needed to. “Lighten up, Rafe. This will be fun, if you go with the flow.”
“That’s not my usual experience,” I said.
I told Beast to head due north. We leveled off about two hundred feet above the pines and began to pick up speed.
According to Abigail, this priest, a Monsignor Padalecki who was apparently a Protonotary Apostolic, an honorary title bestowed by the Pope himself, was semi-retired and lived on Lookout Mountain, outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was fortunate for us in two ways. One, we could be there in an hour or so. Two, the man wasn’t dead.
Tess was handling navigation, as I didn’t want Cris trying to follow a map on her phone while holding onto me. Without my powers, I couldn’t do much to save her if something happened. Tess, on the other hand, could activate her shield and withstand a fall from a few hundred feet, not that I thought she’d ever fall off Maia. In the five or so months since she’d acquired her familiar, Tess had become an experienced flyer.
Once we were outside the metro area of Atlanta, Tess had us angle a little west of north. We maintained that course for less than an hour before Chattanooga and the high promontory of Lookout Mountain came into view. We rose higher as the mountain peaked about fifteen hundred feet above the surrounding terrain. Tess made a slight alteration to our flight path and we angled still more to the west. The Monsignor’s address was actually in Georgia, not Tennessee and was just off the Scenic Highway that ran the length of Lookout Mountain.
Over the mountain, we slowed and looked for a place to set down where we wouldn’t attract attention. The closest vacant area was the parking lot at a small Catholic church, which almost adjoined the address of the lot Abigail had provided.
We landed in the corner of the parking lot, in the shade of large evergreens and a few oaks that were just putting out leaves. After making sure we weren’t being watched, we had our familiar shift into their motorcycle forms and drop their glamours.
“Which
