A psychosis? He thought I was inventing this? “The mystics are real!” I protested, feeling them rise up in me. “You can see them, record them. I’m not imagining this! The things I can do. The things I see. Explain that!”
Al looked beaten as he cast his eyes on me. “Oh, the energy is real. You can collect it. Use it. The voices are not.”
Trent shook in anger. “You will do nothing?”
“Don’t you understand? There’s nothing to take out!” Al thundered.
My heart thudded in my chest, and I was afraid when Al looked at me again, his thick hands opening and closing. I remembered their feel around my throat, and I took a step back.
“But I can help her on her way,” Al intoned, and I backed up farther. “End this travesty. We do not need another Newt.”
He was going to kill me.
“Al!” I exclaimed, backpedaling, but he had me by the throat.
“Go away,” he snarled, flinging a hand out at Trent, and he was tossed to the pavement, face ashen in the moonlight as he pulled himself up.
The mystics rose, swarming like bees. Trent saw them. Al felt them, his expression becoming even more disgusted. They demanded action, that I strike the demon down, that I destroy him with a word. I knew I could do it, but I didn’t. I made them fall about our feet like dust as I hung in Al’s gentle grip around my throat.
“You could have had everything,” Al said, my face mirrored in his goat-slitted red eyes. “Everything and all time. And you threw it away. If you’d left him as your familiar, we would’ve overlooked it, but you freed him, and we won’t allow you to give them a foot on our neck again. This, Rachel Mariana Morgan, will not be tolerated.”
I closed my eyes, doing nothing as his power gathered, tingling between us. I knew to the bottom of my soul that he’d do it. I’d wounded him too deeply. He knew I’d never be any closer to him than we were today, but that I had found love with those he hated was too much.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, knowing why he’d kept Ceri as a slave for a thousand years.
“It’s not nearly enough,” he said softly.
“Gally!” Newt screamed, and I jerked as my air cut off. “Let her go!”
I choked, eyes flashing open to see her standing beside Trent, horrified.
I clutched at Al’s wrists, struggling for air, refusing to let the mystics harm him. I wouldn’t strike him. I wouldn’t cause his death. Black rimmed my vision, and my lungs burned.
“She looked too long!” Al said, anguish foreign in his eyes. “She drank too deep!”
Newt put a hand on his. It was right before my eyes, the only thing I could see. “Leave.”
“But . . .”
“Leave,” she said again, gentle in understanding. “I’ll finish this. You’ve done enough.”
Finish? I thought, gasping when his fingers eased and I got a breath of air.
“She lay down with him!” Al protested, grip loosening even more. “An elf!”
Newt’s fingers dug into Al’s wrist. Blood began to drip from under her thumb. “I can tell that,” she said tartly. “I knew it would happen. So did you. Why do you act surprised?”
“He is an elf!” Al shouted, and suddenly I could breathe as I found myself falling to the pavement. “A mother pus bucket of an elf! And she freed him! This is exactly how they enslaved us the last time!”
Pain lanced my hip as I hit the ground. Coughing, I rolled out of the way of Al’s boot, finally coming to a stop against Trent. He pulled me farther away as I gagged on the air, my hands about my bruised throat. Newt was inches from Al, looking up as if it pissed her off.
“You allowed it to happen!” Newt exclaimed, one hand waving in the air. “We all watched you do it. She’s your ward. It’s your fault. And I won’t let you kill her for the audacity of being braver than you!” Leaning deeper into his space, she put her hands on her hips. “You are a coward, Al, and you don’t deserve to stand at her side, much less kill her. Go find a place to hide. A deep one. You’re done here. If she’s strong enough to trust him, she’s strong enough to test the rest of us.”
Al’s anger moved from me to her. Eyes squinting, he rocked back from Newt. “We’re done, Rachel,” he said, his words striking right to my core. “Don’t call on me again. You’re no longer my student.”
“Al,” I said, hand to my throat when it came out in a harsh croak. Mystics spun from me, wreathing him with demands he listen, that he understand. This was not what I’d wanted. But he was blind to me and he put up a hand, stopping my next words.
“My name is Gally, and if I ever see you again, I will kill you.” Spinning to make his coattails furl, he snatched his walking stick from the ground. The top stone was broken off, and he left it behind as he walked away, vanishing between one step and the next. Confused, the mystics swarmed where he had been. My focus shifted deeper, finding a burning building.
“If you hurt her, you die,” Trent said above me.
Oh yeah. We weren’t done yet.
He tensed as Newt strode to us, her androgynous robes snapping about her bare feet. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, brushing him aside so she could help me stand. “You called me.”
I staggered upright, feeling dizzy. He knew Newt’s name? “They can’t be fake,” I said as the mystics returned to me. “They’re real. They’re so real!”
Pain arced through me, and I jerked. Eyes watering, I realized she’d slapped me.
“They’re false,” she said. “Let them go.”
I pulled my hand from my face, warm from the rush of blood. “I tried,” I protested. “I took them right to her. I made them get in the line. They came back!” Frustrated, I ran my hands over my arms as if I could brush them away. “They keep coming back . . .”
Grimacing, Newt pinched my shoulder as she pulled me a step away from Trent. “Let them go,” she demanded again. “Look at me!” she shouted when I tried to say something. “Let them go. They’re constructs of your mind, a way for your limit-bound existence to process the raw energy of creation.”
“Liar!” I yanked free of her. “They’re real. She knows things I can’t possibly guess, and she said someone promised her becoming wouldn’t happen again. Why would she say that if she wasn’t real?”