Suddenly I realized I was attracting the parts of her that resonated with my current mood. The thought to use that to my advantage crossed me, and I wavered as the Goddess’s own crafty thoughts of trickster wish fulfillment coated me in an unreal slurry. Reeling, I felt as if I was caught in a roller-coaster nightmare and couldn’t get out. It was like trying to walk through a morass where the ground kept shifting.
Here! the Goddess thought suddenly, and when her eyes turned from me, I clawed my awareness out from under it all. My thoughts!
But the Goddess’s elation too soon mutated into confusion. They can’t hear me, rose a thousand laments. They can’t hear me!
Struggling to think through her noise, I scraped together the thinning remnants of the Goddess’s resolve. She wasn’t thinking three dimensionally, but four. I need to have mass, I said, trying to impress upon her that her straying thoughts couldn’t hear her because they weren’t in space, but mass. We have to leave the line as they did.
Line, line, she lamented. There is no line, there is only . . .
I shifted my aura and left the line, praying we weren’t underground. The Goddess felt me slip from her, and I shuddered as little claws of thought dug into my awareness. With a wrench that tore me, I felt her extrapolate from where I was, modulate what I could not, and as easy as breathing, felt myself become solid. Sort of. She was with me still, in the spaces inside me.
Surprise, elation, and understanding filled her, spilling over into me. There is a line, the Goddess thought, her conviction growing as she saw, understood, and accepted. And then she began to play with it, shifting my aura in and out, tasting what it was like to go from solid to thought, and back to solid.
Enough! I shouted. Heart pounding and lungs starved for air, I phased back into existence, the Goddess firmly embedded within me as I dropped to one knee. My hands clenched into a thick, yellow shag carpet. It was the best feeling ever, even if it was matted, and I took a moment to simply breathe. I had a tiger by the tail, and I didn’t know if I could survive a thousand thoughts-not-mine racing through me.
Not so much! I begged her. Fewer thoughts. I can’t . . . carry all of you . . . at once.
Denial met me, and I stared at the carpet, demanding that she look at it, absorb its intricacies of chaos and how they manipulated the mass around space with color and texture.
A huge chunk of her finally did, finding delight in it, and I could breathe. My connection to the ley line was unbreakable, and it flowed through me with the roar of a fire. I could hear the sound of clicking keys and low, muted voices. I stared at my sock foot, and the Goddess thought it was amazing how something solid was used to cover living mass. I am in a mass that is sentient, she thought. Impossible. Only energy can be sentient.
“Oh my God!” someone exclaimed, and the clicking of keys stopped.
I wanted to look up, but I was afraid to move, and I wiggled my big toe.
“Ah, Ayer?” a masculine voice said, and I cringed.
“What the hell?” Ayer said, and I wrestled for more control, forcing the Goddess into the background where she focused on my lungs and the bits of matter I needed in order to keep from dying and snuffing my thoughts born from organized mass. After the two corpses in my front living room, I thought it might be important.
Living, dying, so small a shift, so big a difference And it hinges on . . . this little bit of mass? she thought, only now understanding why her previous vessels kept failing her.
“Yeah,” I whispered, glad I had enough command to speak again as I slowly pulled control of my body back to me.
“Nothing registered on the auratoscope, Ayer. She just . . . appeared.”
“That tricky elf came through,” he said, and I got my head up, my attention flitting briefly over the two banks of electronic equipment staffed by men and women in military garb before going to the dark windows. I was in a large, high-ceilinged living room, an entire wall of windows looking out over the Hollows, the Ohio River, and Cincinnati beyond. The land spilled out before me, breathtakingly beautiful with the lights and fires of the living. Fifty years ago, it had been prime real estate. Not so much anymore, being too far from the city center and in the wilds.
The Goddess fastened on it, drawing understanding from me as I filled in the blanks of what she was seeing. Shag carpet, sunken living room, and top-of-the-line electronics that didn’t go with the seventies vibe the sunken living room and fire pit were giving me. And of course, the Free Vampires playing army.
New concepts spilled through the Goddess as I took control and rose, thoughts of balance and mass and the sensation of gravity—an unseen presence that grew from mass itself. Heart pounding, I stood facing them, my fear muting to anger as the Goddess gathered her rage at her missing thoughts.
“I don’t believe it,” Ayer said, motioning at two men at the outskirts. “Take her.”
I remained still as they reached for their weapons and made an uneasy semicircle around me. I didn’t really care. Like they could hold me? I thought, the Goddess agreeing. “You might want to rethink this,” I said, and Ayer blinked in surprise. His eyes were so much like Kisten’s it hurt.
“Sir, she’s not dead,” a frightened man in fatigues and a buzz cut said as he held a readout to Ayer. “She’s coated in them,” he whispered, eyes going black. “What do you want to do?”
Ayer looked down, then back to me. “Landon said the Goddess can’t inhabit the living, only the dead. Get me a different reading. That’s impossible.”
“No, just really uncomfortable,” I said, squinting at the ceiling. “She’s focused on the light photons right now, but I suggest you give her the mystics you’ve captured.”
“She?” Ayer waved the men to stand down. Reluctantly they did. “My God, you didn’t go crazy. She’s in there? With you?”
His avarice caught the Goddess’s attention, and together we focused on him, comparing the electricity in the wires in the walls to the electricity in his brain, all jumping about in a chaotic perfection. “Singular who stole my thoughts,” I said, but it was the Goddess speaking through me. “Give them back.” My hand went out palm up, the Goddess having sifted through my thoughts and finding the gesture appropriate.
Shock crossed him, and he backed up a graceful step. We breathed in the scent of frightened vampire, relishing the way it made our skin sparkle like the space between mass.
“Yes, she talks,” I said, wishing I could force her to put my hand down, but I was picking my battles and was glad I had control of my mouth. “Go on. Explain to her why you’re stealing her thoughts. I’m curious myself.”
Suddenly I was moving forward, struggling for control. “I did not dream you,” the Goddess said through me, my accent unchanged, but her anger now coloring it. “You’re therefore singular. And fragile.”Weapons were cocking, and fear iced through me. Stop! I demanded. I’m fragile too! And she did, though I don’t know why. Maybe my fear pulled all hers together to one spot and made the danger more real.
“Singular?” Ayer took another readout from a white-faced woman with a gun on her hip. The Goddess tasted my fear, weighed it against her own, and dismissed it as incidental. How can a small bit of mass projected from a dead object end you? she wondered, but doubt seeped into her confidence when she dug deeper and found the answer.
“Singular,” I echoed, answering Ayer. “As in not a part of her.” But the Goddess’s outrage was growing. “Ah, I suggest you let them go!” I said, gaining a smidgen of control as I took another unwilling step toward him. “Please!”
“Ayer!” someone shouted as I tried to stay still and failed. “What do you want us to do!”
“Stand down!” he shouted, backing up out of my reach. “I want her alive!”
Swell, he wants me alive? “Listen to me,” I said as I got my feet to stop moving. “I know you think Landon is helping you, but once the masters are dead, he’s going to turn on you. You’ve got to stop this. Now!”
Behind him, I saw uneasy glances and guilt, but Ayer studied me calmly, noting the Goddess inside. “I know Landon lies, but that doesn’t mean he’s not useful. My original aim was smaller. A personal choice limited to a building or a room. With his help?” he said, a graceful hand shifting to encompass the entire city. “We can end the suffering of all our people. I agree it’s less than ideal right now, but as soon as all the masters die, the living will submit, faced with a true death and no second chances. Landon doesn’t control us. I control us.”
Again there were downcast eyes. The Goddess saw it, and I told her what it meant. Ayer had gone beyond what his people had wanted. There was a schism. There was a chance. “Yeah?” I shuffled forward a step, trying not to. “What makes you so sure you can outfox him? He already set you up. Told the FIB it was you all along.”
Ayer smiled, beautifully oblivious. “He lost his faith, and without that, elves are easy to control. That, and he wants to see you dead.”
“My existence is singular,” the Goddess said through me, and Ayer’s focus sharpened as he heard the difference. “I cannot die. I can only become. And you can’t make me.”
“She’s completely nuts!” someone whispered.
“No. She’s got a god in her,” Ayer said tersely. “Are we in the green? Run it.”
I spun. The Goddess didn’t understand my alarm as a man flicked a lever on a panel and the lights dimmed. Far away, I heard a thrum, and a thump shifted the air.
Elation not mine pulsed through me. It was the Goddess, and she strengthened inside me until I staggered and fell to a knee. It was her thoughts. Her missing self. She’d found them!
“No!” I cried out, even as she forced us upright and staggering to the center of the room before the windows, arms outstretched as she searched.
“Don’t touch her!” Ayer bellowed, and I wrestled just enough control from the Goddess to make a circle. She was oblivious as bullets zinged and ricocheted.
“I said leave her alone!” Ayer screamed, yanking the weapon from the nearest man. “I will drop the next man who touches a trigger! Use the darts!”
The Goddess’s dismay cascaded over me, heady and unending. They refuse to become! she wailed, and I floundered, trying to get her to listen to my one single thought that it was the machine that held them captive. Destroy the machine, and they’d be free. Would I survive it? I wondered, but the Goddess’s grief was my entire existence, and I’d do anything to make it stop.
“The machine?” the Goddess exclaimed through me as she finally listened, and I felt ill with the sudden rise of emotion. “They’re caught in the . . . In that?”
Together we looked at the machine, and with an odd twist, I felt myself see with her awareness, feeling the tiny space the machine created to hold thoughts born and existing in the space between. I stared at it, my awe coloring her outrage. It was a tiny bubble pulled out of time, created with wild magic and science. Landon had created a new ever-after, but one so small it could be lost on the head of a pin. It was all they could muster, but it was enough to hold a Goddess’s thoughts.
“We’re good!” someone shouted, and her outrage flamed as the Goddess finally realized what they’d done. She shook within me, and as I struggled to maintain the circle. They’re blind to me, she thought. I hear them singing, and they sing the wrong song.
“Release them!” I screamed, but I wasn’t sure if it was me or the Goddess.
“Ready . . .” Ayer said as they backed up, and I saw the circle of wire they’d put about me. “Now!”
My eyes widened as a man at a bank of equipment shoved a thick lever up. Lights dimmed, and the thrum pounded through me. A scream ripped from my throat as a wave of pure wild magic cascaded from my soul to my fingers, outstretched in pain. It struck the machine full on, and I cowered inside as the Goddess stood firm, arcs of electricity dancing in the suddenly dark room, waves of black energy surging back and forth between the walls, now bowed out and cracking ominously.
And with a bang that echoed in my soul, the bubble of time popped.
No . . . I thought as suddenly the air sparkled. Wild magic. It was everywhere, and a cloud of freed mystics hazed the air. I felt them inside me as I breathed, blinked them from my eyes like tears. But the Goddess gloried in them, her thoughts bright with power as she called them to her, waiting to bring them home to become with her again.
“Get up! Get up!” someone was screaming, the faint glow from the sky the only light in the room. “Divert power! Increase flow. Take them! Take them all!”
The room was both pitch-black and bright as day as mystics glowed in my mind’s eye. Madly moving silhouettes between me and the glass darted, and the Goddess danced within me.
That is, until the first few thoughts of her failure reached me. The mystics were not responding, even the ones she’d just sent out to bring the others in.
“Increase it!” Ayer shouted. “Get out of my way. I’ll do it myself!” he snarled, shoving the dazed man out of his chair and taking his place. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I knew it was him by the sparking of neurons in his brain. “I want all of them!”
Elation dimming, the Goddess seemed to hesitate. They’re not my thoughts, she said, turning inward to me, her sole guide to this madness of mass. They won’t become!
The rapid shift of emotion was draining, and I staggered, going down before the windows. “I told you they were changed,” I whispered, and she snatched control back.