David Wilson - Vintage soul

Ezzel had posed as her apprentice, and during the time he’d spent with her, she’d shared a lot of her knowledge with him. There might be other things he’d taken, and there was no way to know what he might have stolen from her books and papers when her guard was down. It was infuriating, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances with him. Whatever she used he might be ready to counter. She’d have to dig deep and be resourceful. Thankfully, everything she knew had not been shared, and not everything she owned that was powerful was stored in the single vault he’d stolen the timeline crystals from.

She stopped a floor below where the bottom of the elevator car hung over her head. Clinging to the maintenance ladder, she leaned out and breathed a handful of dust on to the crack in the center of the door in the side of the shaft. As that dust settled, she spoke a short charm. The doors slid open. She swung out on the ladder, away from the door, and then used the momentum of the return swing to flip in through the opening. She landed heavily, but without injury, and rolled to her feet. She pressed to the wall, slipped to the first corner, and then stood very still.

She didn’t really expect to meet anyone in the hall, but she was in no mood for further mistakes. If Ezzel completed this ritual, part of the blame was hers, and if she couldn’t stop him, she intended to let him know she was there. It wasn’t so much the ritual, or his thievery, or even the deaths he took so lightly. It was the fact that he’d lied to her, fooled her, worked with her and gained her trust.

She rounded the corner and began checking doors. All were locked until she reached the last. It hung open, and she saw dim, flickering light in the dark opening. She moved very slowly up to the edge of the door frame and stopped. Then she took a deep breath and glanced inside.

At first she saw only shadows. The walls were stone, and the only light was from a couple of guttering candles that had nearly burned themselves out. There was very little furniture. She saw a cot along one wall. There was a small table. She saw and sensed no one.

Once inside, she moved along the wall carefully, searching the barren room for shadows and finding none. Then she reached the cot, and when she did, she noticed something dangling from the wall just beyond it. It wasn’t very large, and at first she thought it might be empty chains, or a torn tapestry. She stepped closer, looked, and reeled away, gagging. What hung from the manacles on the wall and leaned precariously over the lip of the metal collar was barely recognizable as human. The skin was like leather worn so thin and brittle it could have been paper. The eye sockets were empty pits. Bones jutted and threatened to release their tenuous hold on one another.

“Vanessa.” Amethyst whispered the name, but she didn’t look back. She knew what the remains hanging on the wall meant. Caution was no longer a viable option. She needed to find Ezell immediately, and probably that wouldn’t be soon enough.

She pulled a small yellow crystal from her pocket and tossed it in the air. Before it could fall she snapped a command and whipped her finger in an intricate spiral between herself and the door. The crystal fell about a foot, wobbled in the air, and then hovered. It pointed toward the center of the building, and down. She snatched the crystal and took off at a run.

She didn’t bother to follow the hallway around to the end; that was where the other elevator would end, and that was where Donovan would enter. There was no way to know how he intended to get in, but since the wall was solid, and the elevator was apparently strong enough to hold adult vampires against their will, it was unlikely to be a good idea to be on this side of the wall when he decided to drop in.

As she ran, she let the yellow crystal hover just above the palm of her hand, and a moment later she was back at the first elevators shaft. There were no stairs. She leaned out through the still open doors, grabbed the maintenance ladder, and swung back into the shaft.

The crystal led her down two levels. There was a door, but it was not readily visible. She had to search, then close her mind and visualize it, before it shimmered into view. She wondered for just a moment why the car was all the way at the top. If she’d wondered another second, it would have been too long. She leaned out, blew the powder into the crack of the door and gripped the ladder. There was a grinding roar, and without thought she swung out and whipped herself through the air. As she moved, she screamed the opening charm and prayed it would work quickly enough. She launched herself at the doorway. Even as she slid through the opening, barely clearing the sides of the half-open door, hit the floor and rolled, the elevator ground to a halt. The inner door opened with a snick.

Amethyst glanced back, shuddered, and then turned to scan the hall. There was no one in sight, but she no longer needed the crystal to guide her. There was only one large, ornate doorway. A glow slipped out around the cracks. She stood still and closed her eyes. The shimmering vibration of the timeline crystals shivered through her pores. They were approaching resonance — the point when the radiance Ezzel had drawn from the depths of each would blend with that from the other until they formed a portal between them. At the final point of the ritual, he would step out between them, pass through that radiance, and the effects of the formula would become final and irreversible. In that small nexus of power, the past, present and future would be one single moment, and beyond that, the effects of the passage of minutes, hours, days and centuries would have no further affect. That was the theory.

She didn’t want to see it tested. She cleared her mind, drew in what energy she could from the air, from the amulets and crystals she wore, and even from the vibration of the timeline stones themselves. They were her crystals, after all, and they had been hers for many years. She’d spent time with them, studied them; a part of her was imprinted in their depths, and in the frequency of their vibration. Ezzel might have cleansed them before putting them to use, but somehow she didn’t believe he’d done it. He knew a lot, and he had talent, but no one knew everything, and crystals were her specialty, not his. These were very powerful, very delicate artifacts, and he’d have to travel a long way to find another pair their equal. If he cleansed them improperly, he could disturb the balance, and the repercussions wouldn’t quiet for months. If he was smart, he’d left them alone and taken his chances. She hoped it would be enough.

She crossed the hall and tried the knob on the door. To her surprise, it wasn’t locked. She turned it, peered through the crack, and gasped. The circle was immense, and it was active. The smoky cloud that obscured it was thick and dense. She couldn’t’ make out what was happening on the other side, and though she knew she was equally obscured, it did little to calm her nerves. This was powerful magic, and once the circle was in place, it was beyond foolish to try and cross it, or break it. The purpose of the circles of protection was to protect those inside the circle from what they summoned, and to protect those outside the circle from the energies contained within. Any sudden, unexpected break could destroy whoever stood inside the circle, or whoever stood outside. If it were powerful enough magic, it could be worse.

She took in the room at a glance. It was nothing like she’d expected. She’d known Ezzel for months, but as her apprentice, a quiet, soft-spoken man who was eager to do whatever she asked, and who might as well have been part of the wall when she wasn’t working with him. This room, this explosion of wealth and power and ostentatious — nonsense — didn’t equate with the man she’d thought she knew.