Jessica Andersen - Magic Unchained

“Yeah,” Dez said. “Do it. We’ll deal with the logistics.”

Working fast, riding high on the power that was apparently his alone—the others sure didn’t seem to notice it—Rabbit slapped heavy blocks around Zane’s key memories of Skywatch and the people inside it, repressing them and installing new surface memories that turned the training compound into an encampment hidden in the Blue Mountains, the Nightkeepers into a doomsday militia that was raided and scattered.

All the while, he was acutely aware of the power flowing through him. It wasn’t dark magic but wasn’t fully light, either. It was his mother’s magic, now his own.

Gods, he had almost started to believe she’d been a dream.

“Rabbit? You okay?” The question came in Dez’s voice. “You need a break?”

“Nope, I’m almost finished.” Hurrying now, he soldered the last few blocks into place and added a couple of fail-safes, along with giving Zane a newfound craving for garlic pickles, because he liked Cara, damn it, and the bastard had messed with her. He might have done more—how’s a little erectile dysfunction sound, there, Zane, old boy?—but the magic was tugging him back toward his cottage, to the place where he’d hidden the two eccentrics.

He could feel the small carvings vibrating, yearning to be together for the first time since he’d discovered the second one. He didn’t know how or why, but the channel for communication was wide-open, waiting for him to tap into it.

“He’s all set,” he said as he started backing out of Zane’s consciousness layer by layer. Where he usually had to brace himself to pull out when he’d been so deeply enmeshed, now there was just a faint tug of conscience, a protest from the part of himself that remembered what it felt like to have his own brain fucked with, and regretted having to do it to someone else, even a traitor.

Then he was out of Zane’s mind and back in his own, blinking to clear his vision while the others talked over his head. The room spun. The magic heated, calling him, begging him.

“Gotta go,” he mumbled, shoving abruptly to his feet and heading for the door of the small storage room–slash–prison cell. “Need to…” He pantomimed barfing. “He’s fine. He’s good. Send him wherever he’s gonna go.”

Cara took a couple of steps toward him. “Do you need something? Food? Help back to your cottage?” As much as she tried not to be a winikin, she was a nurturer at heart. Not that she would thank him for saying it, even if he could get a coherent sentence through the pounding beat of magic that filled his head.

“No. I’m fine,” he managed, though he didn’t think any of them were buying it. “Just need a bathroom.”

He made it upstairs to the one on the mansion’s main floor, locked the door, and turned on the water in the sink to cover any telltale noises. Then he yanked his knife, blooded his palms, and sank to the tiled floor opposite the john, his body going heavy and lax as he focused inward, knowing what he had to do and sensing that he was running out of time, the channel of communication threatening to fade if he didn’t get it right.

Concentrating so hard that sweat popped down his spine and chilled against the cool marble of the bathroom wall, he thought of the eccentrics, stuck in separate socks at the bottom of a drawer. Telekinesis was his weakest talent, but with all the magic rocketing through him right then, he could’ve moved a frigging mountain.

Instead, he eased the eccentrics out of their socks and slid them together, all of it happening inside his underwear drawer. He felt the pieces move, felt them click into place and fuse. The universe seemed to take a breath and hold it. Then there was a soundless detonation inside him, a boom of pressure. For a second his perceptions lurched and grayed out.… And when they cleared, he found himself standing in the middle of a blasted desert that wasn’t like anything he’d ever experienced before.

What… the… fuck?

He turned a full circle, seeing only gray and more gray: an ashen landscape of dunes and black, twisted trees with a horizon of a black, featureless sky.

It looked like the in-between, the wasteland that separated the plane of the living from that of the dead, and where souls could walk forever and never get anywhere, looping endlessly until they were ready to begin their journey through Xibalba, where they would be tested and earn their way—maybe, hopefully—to reincarnation. But the in-between didn’t have a fitful breeze that brought him the sharp, acrid smell of ashes, and it was the reddish brown of sky and soil, not corpse gray. More, this didn’t feel like any of the other planes he’d ever been to. If anything, it felt like home, like the earthly plane.

Only it sure as shit didn’t look like it.

A shiver worked its way through him. “Mother?” Although he’d called her “mama” before, that was for kids. And he didn’t know her, not really.

I am here.

He spun and found her behind him, though she hadn’t been there an instant earlier. As before, she wore flowing white and had pale, gleaming eyes. This time, though, she wasn’t translucent. Her body was solid and her bare feet left marks in the ashes. She was really there.

Hello, Rabbie. Her words still sounded in his head, not aloud, but they were stronger now, in a voice that stirred long-buried memories, as did the name.

Rabbie. It had been circling inside his head for days now, alternately warming him and depressing the shit out of him, until he’d felt like a fucking seesaw or a dippy bird or something, zigzagging between extremes of emotion underlaid with the deep, dark fear that it had been a onetime thing, that he’d never see her again.

And now here they were.

He reached for her, needing to touch, but his hand passed right through her image. His gut hollowed out on the realization that wherever they were, he was the ghost. That brought a big-ass chill crawling down his spine, as did the realization that he couldn’t feel the magic anymore, as if he’d used it up… or he was in a place where magic didn’t work.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Is this the dark barrier?” The shiver dug in and got claws, but beneath it there was a thread of excitement. Iago might have blocked him from using the dark magic, but the connection—and the fascination—remained.

It’s not where that matters, but when. This is your home at the dawn of the coming new year.

“My…” Sharp horror flooded him as the twisted black stumps around him stopped looking like random trees and started looking way too familiar. One huge, charred stump rose up above a cluster of smaller tree-skeletons. Beyond that, what he’d initially thought was a series of dunes started looking like the folded-in remains of a steel building buried beneath a layer of ash.

He didn’t need to look behind himself to know that the other dunes were more buildings set in an achingly familiar pattern. And even though he’d never fit in quite right at Skywatch, never been able to fall into lockstep with the others, his heart shuddered.

Gone. All of it… gone.

He could barely breathe as he flashed back to how it used to be, before things got serious and the fun stuff fell by the wayside. He saw bodies crowding and elbows bumping at the tables, the winikin-manned Weber grills set up off to one side, a bruising ball game working its way up and down the open area where the old Great Hall had been, and dappled shadows of sunlight coming down through the lush green leaves of the ceiba tree that marked the center of Skywatch, the heart of their tiny village.

He saw Patience and Brandt, who had taken him in after his old man died, making him feel as welcome as he ever had; he saw their twin sons, Harry and Braden, who had worshiped their Unc’ Rabbit and whom he still missed, even knowing they were safer in hiding. He saw Myrinne in the middle of the game, laughing as she fought Strike for possession of the tough rubber ball. He saw Leah, Anna, Sasha, Cara…