“You fixed it.” Eyes averted, he sat in his chair, fingers steepled. “Your line is fine!”
I pulled his coat from the bench, the crushed velvet smooth against my fingers. On the mantel, Mr. Fish swam up and down, his nose against the glass, ignoring the pellets. I didn’t say a word. Just stood there with his coat over my arm.
“You want to go look at it?” he finally asked, and I held his coat out. “Okay, we’ll go look at it,” he conceded, and I quelled a surge of anxiety. This close to sunset, there’d be surface demons, but I was more afraid of what my ley line looked like.
“Thank you,” I said, and he grumbled something under his breath, shoving his arms in the sleeves and leaning to throw another log on the fire to keep it going until he got back.
“There are no monsters under your bed, Rachel, or in your closet.”
Mood improved, I waited as he checked the buttons on his sleeves and fluffed the lace at his throat. “I found Newt in my closet once.”
He gave me a sideways look and grabbed a mundane oil lamp from a shelf. Nose wrinkling, he did an ignition curse and the lamp glowed. “Damn surface demons. If it’s not the sun burning your aura off, it’s the surface demons harrying you at night.” He stood poised, arms wide. “Well, let’s go! I’ve got things to do tonight that don’t involve you and your pathetically slowly evolving skills.”
I felt better as I came forward to stand with him on the elaborately detailed circle of stone he used as a door. I must have done something right. Sure enough, I felt his satisfaction as the line took us, his kitchen dissolving into nothing as he flung us back to the surface and some place distant from his underground home.
Reality misted back into existence with a gentle ease that made it hard to believe that we had moved. A red-tinted haze struck me, and the gritty wind. Squinting, I turned to the sun still hanging over the horizon. The heat of the day continued to rise from the dry, caked earth, but I could feel a chill in the fading light. Red soil looked as black as old blood in the shadows.
We were at Loveland Castle, and the slump of rock that was all that was left of it here in the ever-after loomed behind us. My ley line hummed at chest height, looking, as Al sourly informed me, as right as rain in the desert, and could we go home now?
Arms about my middle, I spun. Almost unseen in the distance were the crumbling towers of Cincinnati. Nothing but dry grasses and the occasional scrubby tree filled the space between here and there. And rocks. There were rocks. It was the savanna in a decade-long drought.
Except for that odd green circle . . .
“What is that?” I whispered as I realized there was a figure upon the grass, withering on the ground, and Al grunted as he followed my gaze.
“Mother pus bucket,” he muttered, head down as he began stomping toward it. “She’s at it again.”
“She?” But Al hadn’t stopped, and I hastened to catch up. Oh God, it’s Newt, I thought as I saw her unmistakable silhouette standing just outside the circle of green, her arms raised, bare where her androgynous robe had slipped to her elbows. She had short, spiky red hair today, a squat, cylindrical cap done in shades of black and gold atop her head, the colors repeated on her sash and slippers and stained red with the setting sun. A black staff was in her hand as she gestured and chanted at the figure on the living green, crazy as a loon in spring.
“What is she doing?” I said, shocked more from the green grass than anything else.
“Calibration curse,” he said softly. “Maybe she heard about the misfires.” And then he raised his voice. “Newt, love! What has the poor devil ever done to you?”
Clearly knowing we were here, the demon shifted her staff to both hands and held it level before her to pause in her magic. Within the fifteen-foot circle, the surface demon looked up, his thin chest heaving as he panted. His aura looked almost solid, the hatred from his eyes clear. There was a sword at his feet, the red light of the sun gleaming cleanly on it, and as I watched, a sun-brown hand crept out and gripped it.
“It exists,” Newt said, her voice feminine even if the rest of her looked ambiguous. “It’s an affront. What will happen to them when the ever-after collapses? That’s what I want to know. Poor fools.”
Fear rippled through me, and I looked behind me to the ley line. It was collapsing. It was falling apart! I knew it!
“We fixed the line,” Al said, as much for her as for me. “Remember? We had a fine hunt. Rachel’s line is within tolerance.”
Surprise showed on Newt’s face, and a small rock clinked as she turned to the line behind us. The surface demon hammered at the circle to get out, the heavy blade doing no damage, even if it was as tall as he was. “That’s right,” she said, peering at me with her all-black eyes that gave me the creeps. “I forgot, and yet we’re both up here in this putrid filth we wallow in.”
The sun turned me red even as I shivered in the chill of the coming night. “What is that?” I asked, looking at the demon, but what I really wanted to know was how there was living grass.
As distractible as a child, Newt turned, beaming. “It’s a calibration curse,” she said in delight, oblivious to the anger of the surface demon beating upon it. I could almost see clothes, so distinct was he in the low sun.
“It doesn’t look like the curse I know,” I said.
“That’s because it’s calibrating space and time, not balance and skills.”
“Space and time?” I breathed as she began chanting. Immediately the demon dropped his sword and fell to the ground, writhing in pain. Neither Al nor Newt seemed to care. “Al,” I almost hissed. “What is she doing?”
Frowning, Al put a fist to his hip. “She’s moving a bubble of time into the past. The surface demon is caught up in it intentionally, as a marker.”
That explained the green grass, but how far back had she needed to go to find it? “You can do that?”
“She can.” Al pointed with the lantern, the flame pale in the remaining sun. “By comparing the rate of adjusted time to a known span, we can see if anything is out of balance.”
I shuddered when the sun touched the rim of the earth and bled all over it. Newt thought something was wrong, too. “You do this a lot, right? Like a monthly siren test?”
“No,” she said, and the surface demon behind the barrier scrabbled at the edge, his motions becoming erratic. “It hurts.”