Relief echoed in my new emptiness, and with Bis standing beside me, I looked up as a white flash of energy exploded from my ley line. It lit the grove, turning the leaves razor sharp and the grass into slivers of glass. Lips parted, I watched in awe as for an instant, the world hung unmoving, and then the pure light was sucked back into the line taking everything not real with it.
The sudden silence was a shock, broken by the running creek and the lowering wail of a distant emergency siren fading to nothing. Before me, the ley line was a hint of presence, invisible as it should be. The energy in my protection circle hummed. It was simple, the one dimension of sound feeling hollow. Hand shaking, I reached out to feel the strength of it until I got too close and my aura broke the charm. I shook as the flow shifted to run through me back to the line. They were gone. Everything felt normal.
Everything felt . . . dull.
“Did we do it?” Bis asked, and I slowly sat up and brushed the dampness from my palms.
“I think we did.” Aching, I rose to my feet and looked at the moon, not believing it was finished. My brow eased and I almost cried. They were gone, and all I wanted to do was go home and go to bed.
“Bis, if your dad’s still around, I’d like to take him up on his offer of a ride,” I said as I thought of Ivy and then Trent. I didn’t want to travel through the lines right now. Maybe not ever.
He smiled, his black teeth catching the moonlight. “I’ll get him.” He lifted off in a downward pulse of wings, and Jenks darted after him. Somehow, I thought it would have been harder than that, and I sighed, feeling empty and one-dimensional.
Pain! Betrayal! Mystic emotion slammed into me, and I spun to the line as they darted into me, burrowing deep.
“No!” I shouted, hands over my head and cowering as more arrowed out of the line. I stumbled, falling to my hands and knees as wild magic flashed through me, and my hands gripped the soil as it burned and burned and never eased. What had happened? They’d gone in. I’d felt them leave me!
“You!” thundered a familiar voice, and I looked up past my stringy hair, gaping at Ayer standing before me, sopping wet and pale—too pale to be alive anymore. A cement block was tied to his leg, and he shambled forward, oblivious to it even as it brought him to a halt.
“Ayer?” I gasped, confused and unable to think past the mystics pouring into me, all of them frightened and making my head pound. How had he gotten here? How had he gotten twice dead?
But the answer was obvious, and I pushed up until I sat back on my heels, trying to breathe around the mystics in my head. Landon had killed Ayer. He’d dumped him in the Ohio River by the looks of it, where the cold had kept his neural net somewhat functional—because everything seemed to be working. As zombies went, he was a good one, because it wasn’t Ayer anymore. It was the Goddess.
“Ah, I can explain,” I said as I wobbled to my feet. The mystics were pooling in familiar places, making the pinch of wild magic almost bearable. It hurt, though, solidifying my idea that the mystics would eventually kill me, even if they didn’t mean to. I wasn’t a being of energy and space. I was made of mass, and I felt the power squeeze from me as my muscles bunched.
The Goddess’s eyes latched on to mine, chilling in intensity. “You took them,” she said, Ayer’s beautiful face and voice twisted in anger until they were ugly. I’d taught her that, either through my returning mystics or when she’d possessed me. Her power visibly danced over Ayer’s pale skin, cresting over him like a purple wave, little sparks of energy flashing like her eyes in the moonlight.
“You left them!” I backed up, wincing at the first cut of a thousand wings on my thoughts, and my mystics rose in outrage. “I brought them back to you! All of them! I freed them and brought them home! I don’t want them! Take them!”
Again she pushed Ayer forward, and he stumbled, almost falling when the block stopped him. “I can’t,” she said through him, and the rope dissolved. His skin, pale with death, was glowing. “You made them become. To take them back would make me become. I will not become. You will be ended, trickster Morgan!”
“What?” I kept moving, the long grass hissing against my legs. “No!” I didn’t understand, and Ayer’s expression bunched. I choked, hands rising to my neck as suddenly a wave of her mystics covered me, clogging my mouth and blinding my eyes with pinpricks of sensation. She was trying to suffocate me, and I staggered, panic rising.
My mystics rallied, rising from my skin to drive her eyes away and making the Goddess howl. In a wave of anger, she blew the grove apart. I fell, and from the corner of my sight I saw Etude spin away. Bis and Jenks were gone as well. Shaken, I knelt on the ground, my skin prickling with fire.
“You made them become!” the Goddess said, Ayer’s voice echoing in my ears as the vampire stood over me, the rank smell of dead vampire and soured river water filling my nose. “You lied. You stole them from me.”
“They’re right there!” I shouted, just wanting her to go away, and then I screamed as another wave of mystics arrowed to me, pain bending me double as my throat suddenly clogged with feathers.
“I brought them back!” I screamed, panicking as I tried to shove the mystics out of my mind, but they slipped around my demand, falling back into me like water. “Take them! They’ll adapt!”
“They. Will. Not!” she thundered through Ayer, and the vampire’s skin flamed white. “They have become. Not again! I will not become again!”
But suddenly I could breathe, and I stared as the Goddess’s mystics peeled from me in a visible wave, chased away by my own mystics.
No . . . The Goddess shrieked and flailed in anger, beating at nothing I could see. They hadn’t been chased away. Her mystics were changing, becoming, in a visible wave.
Shaking, I got to my feet, still trying to figure this out as Ayer stumbled backward, the Goddess wailing as the gold of my mystics slurried through her purple haze. Like rivers in reverse, tendrils of light snaked through the aura of power surrounding her. As Ayer spun and slapped, the tendrils grew, became threads, became streams, became sources for more tendrils that grew into nets.
It’s the becoming, I suddenly realized. It was me, the way I’d changed the mystics in order to survive them. I was seeing the concepts and ideas I’d given them snaking through the Goddess’s psyche, changing her in turn, making her become something different, in essence, killing her.