“Damn, Sullivan,” Catcher said as I offered the bottle back to him. He declined, so I recorked it, set it aside. “Merit’s got that Angry Master look down pat. You should probably be careful using that particular moniker.”
Ethan grinned at me. “He has a point, Duchess. You are good at it.”
I growled. Maybe I needed to challenge him more often, I thought. Just to keep him in line.
Ethan leaned over, pressed a kiss to my lips. “If it helps, you became Sentinel very, very quickly.”
I kept my gaze narrowed. “Does the entire House know about this?”
There was amusement in his eyes. “Fewer than those who know about ‘Darth Sullivan.’”
“Touché,” I said after a moment.
“If you’re done flirting,” Catcher said, “should we get on with the magic?”
“Let’s do,” Mallory said, pulling a match from the box. “I’m ready to get started.”
“What should we do?” I asked.
“Seem friendly. We don’t want to scare it.” With that, she flicked the match against the side of the box, spark and sulfur following in its wake. She put aside the box, carefully applied fire to the stick of rosemary. The herbal scent filled the air, made me hungry for baked chicken. But I put that aside.
Silently, Mallory opened her notebook, scribbled something on a page, tore it out. She folded the page into a complicated arrangement, held it over the smoldering rosemary until it caught fire, too, and dropped it into the platter.
“For ambience and explanation,” Mallory said, then sat cross-legged, hands on her knees, and straightened her back. And she began winding up her magic.
Catcher had once told me that sorcerers didn’t make magic—they funneled it. They were capable, for genetic or paranormal reasons, of funneling the universe’s magic, redirecting it for some purpose of their own. That was what Mallory did now, pulling in magic that was warm enough to make steam literally rise from the top of her head.
She cupped her hands together, blew into them.
“Is she blowing out the magic?” I quietly asked.
Catcher clucked his tongue. “She’s warming up her hands, noob.”
Logical, but how was I supposed to know? I didn’t spend many nights with Mal in public parks trying to contact unseen magical creatures.
Hands apparently warm enough, Mallory cupped them in front of her. A spark appeared, which grew larger and brighter as she concentrated, lips moving and head bobbing in some silent motion. I’d have guessed she was singing a favorite Muse song, but that would probably also be wrong, so I kept it to myself.
The spark blossomed to the size of a golf ball, then a baseball, then a softball, the light bright enough to shine blue through her hands, like when I’d held my fingers over a flashlight as a child.
When the orb of light, the same pale blue as a summer sky, was large enough, she opened her eyes. “Carefully,” she murmured to herself, and leaned forward, placed the ball on the platter. It hovered there, vibrating with power, casting pale light on our faces.
I glanced around, hoped no one was watching us. Sorcerers were out of the closet, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea for humans to watch this little experiment. Considering the weather, they might have called the CPD first, asked questions later.
Mallory sat back again, cleared her throat. “We’ve created a receiver. We’ll see if we can dial it in.” She put a hand over the fireball, fingers extended, and slapped the air on top of it.
The motion created a dull, round sound that rippled the air, just like she’d dropped a pebble in a lake. The circles moved out from the orb, to us, through us, until they diffused a few yards away.
Hand over the orb, ear cocked to the sky, Mallory waited. “We’re here,” she said. “And we’re looking for you.”
She hit the orb again, making another dull sound and sending another wave rippling.
But there was still no response. Not that I was entirely sure what kind of response we were supposed to receive.
“What are we hoping to hear?” Ethan asked.
“Acknowledgment,” Mallory said. “I know it can hear me. The messages are bouncing back.”
“Like radar,” Ethan said, and Mallory nodded.
“The concussion finds something, the message comes back. I can sense it.” She lifted her gaze to Catcher. “You?”
He nodded. “Faintly, but yeah. There’s something out there.”
“Then we try it louder,” she said. She resituated herself, blew out a breath, and positioned her hand over the orb again. She gave the orb another whack, then a second, and a third.
The sounds seemed to grow louder, deeper, with each hit, until it felt like the vibrations would stop my heart.
This time, the greetings made it through. And the voice didn’t like our intrusion.
Lightning ripped across the sky, thunder cracking like the shot of a rifle at point-blank range. Power burst across the field like a slapping hand, and then I was flying, the city lights blurred with movement.
I hit the ground on my back, my diaphragm seizing with shock, head rapping against the ground, my fingers and toes tingling with heat and energy.
I lay there for a moment in the grass, looking up at the few stars that had managed to pierce the sky. Each was surrounded by a halo of light, and bees buzzed in my ears.
Slowly, I pushed up on my elbows, looked around. Ethan, Catcher, and Mallory were on the ground, too, all blinking up at the sky. We’d fallen perpendicularly to one another, our bodies aligned like the points of a compass. And between us, the orb still glowed.
“Well,” Mallory said, pushing hair from her face.
I sat up, put a hand on my forehead, as if that would stop the world from spinning. “That was not a success. That was some kind of magical grenade.”
“It was a success,” Mallory said, and we all looked at her.
“How?” Ethan asked, brushing snow from his sleeves.
“We know it heard us. And we know it can fight back.” She moved to her knees, poked at the rosemary with a finger, then sat back on her heels. She looked up at the sky, closed her eyes, the breeze blowing her hair across her pinked cheeks. After a moment of silence, she looked at us. “We need to try again.”
“No.” This time, Ethan said it. “Absolutely not.”
“Agreed,” I said. “When you poke the bear and it tries to tear your face off, you regroup and replan.”
Ethan rubbed the back of his head. “Or perhaps you can try again solo and give us the report later. While we’re several miles away.”
Mallory sat up but looked back at the ground, frowning. “Look, even if the answers are somehow automatic, if the delusions are just emotions trapped in the magic, and no thing is actually asking for help, we can still learn from it. If we keep asking questions, maybe we can get a sense of its spread, of its size, from the answers we get back.”
“Like echoes,” I offered.
“Like echoes,” she agreed. “We’re running out of time. She’s getting ready for something big, and that big is going to happen very, very soon. If we aren’t prepared for it, it’s going to be worse than Towerline.”
Towerline had been half success and half disaster, with plenty of injuries and destruction.
Ethan opened his mouth but closed it again and glanced at Catcher, who was rolling his head, then his shoulders, as if trying to loosen a stubborn ache. Then he looked at us.
“We’re all in one piece,” Catcher said. “I’m not suggesting you’re cowards if you don’t try again, but . . .”
“But you’re subtly implying it,” Ethan said.
Catcher grinned. “This is magic, friends. It’s a dangerous game. Maybe vampires can’t hack it.”
Ethan’s eyes blazed silver. “Is that a dare?”
“If that’s what it takes.” Catcher looked at me. “We have to try something. This is currently the only thing we know to try.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic, so I looked at Mallory. She’d pulled a small kraft-paper notebook from her bag, was thumbing through it. “Just give me a minute.”