Rachel Caine - Unknown

Agreed, I sent back.

Beneath my hands, the rock suddenly softened, flowing around my hands, and I felt the same happening where my boots were jammed into precarious footholds. The rock solidified, trapping hands and feet into secure pockets. I couldn’t fall now.

I also couldn’t move on my own will, without undoing the power Luis had put in place.

The winds rose, whipping through the narrow chasm. At first it felt like shoves, then battering blows. Debris slammed through—lighter things first, then larger pieces of wood, flat rocks, discarded metal. I kept my face down, pressed to the stone, partially protected by my arms. It was all I could do.

Lightning flared in lurid, graceful fans overhead, and just when I felt that the wind would rip my arms out of my sockets with its relentless push, it began to slacken. Rain pounded down, instead, hard and silver, ice cold. I gasped and waited for it to stop.

I rose into the aetheric, anchored by Luis only a few feet away, and watched the glow of the two Wardens standing at the edge of the chasm, above. One—the child—glowed in colors that shouldn’t have been possible, and the damage was awful and obvious in the persona he projected out into the world; a twisted gnome of a boy, scarred and melted. He’d been taught this. Forced into it.

The woman with him was little better, though her particular darkness glowed like poison through her veins. Her own choice, not imposed on her. She had power of her own, though not enough to have been a Warden in her own right. Possibly, once, one of the Ma’at.

The adult and the child stopped their interference with the energy of the storms, the river, the wind, and almost immediately it all slackened and fell into a confused, roiling mess. Neither of them bothered to balance the power out. That was dangerous; aetheric energy, summoned and left undirected, could trigger all manner of disasters, especially here, near the brilliant flood of energy that was the ley line, the invisible network of energy that linked together nexus points.

They’re gone, I told Luis. He released his hold on the rock, and it flowed away from our hands and feet, back to its original configuration. My muscles had taken advantage of the support to rest themselves, and my pace upward increased dramatically.

Close. So close.

There.

My hands touched the grass at the top, and I pulled myself up, rolled, and immediately fell flat, facedown so that I could institute my own protective cover, which made me a slightly uneven rise and fall in the velvety green lawn. I hardly saw Luis at all, or Turner, but I knew my partner had placed the same chameleon measures over them.

Very slowly, we began to make our way, on our bellies, across the lawn. Not in the way you see in films . . . not crawling, with our bodies in the air, braced on forearms. We slid along the grass, bellies flat, pulling ourselves slowly forward with flattened hands. It was slow, tedious work, but effectively silent and almost impossible to spot, even on the open ground, with the kind of camouflage we employed.

But with the time we had lost, I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the dome before Sanders triggered his distraction, drawing people directly toward us.

And then I saw one of the bear- panther chimeras emerge from the trees at the perimeter, sniff the air suspiciously, and begin to pad across the grass, nostrils flaring for scent.

Cass, Luis whispered.

I see it.

It’s going to smell us.

No question of that. It already had, though it was baffled by the lack of visible evidence of our presence. It padded around us in a slow circle, orange eyes fixed on the open space where one of its senses reported we were, and the others reported we were not.

Can you put it out? I asked Luis.

Maybe, he responded. If it gets close enough. But that leaves us with a huge unconscious problem for anybody to notice. Which is not the point of stealth.

I closed my eyes, pushed my face into the clean, springy grass, and sent my aetheric senses out to find something, anything we could use.

I found a deer. A magnificent young buck, sharpening his antlers against a tree just beyond the tree line.

I panicked him with a pulse of Earth power and sent him bounding into the clearing, where he froze in shock at the sight of the huge, feline form of the chimera snuffling at apparently empty grass.

The chimera’s head snapped up, the elusive smell of humans suddenly overridden by obvious prey.

Run, I told the deer, and released it. It turned and crashed back into the trees, bounding for its life.

The bear/panther roared after it, powering on massively muscled legs. Other howls answered it from all sides—the pack, taking up the hunt. I felt sickened, but the deer had already made the fatal error; I had only exploited it to our advantage.

We crawled as fast as such things could be accomplished.

We were not quite at the glowing curve of the dome when I heard the revving of engines on the other side of the chasm. Agent Sanders was making noise, a lot of it. Voices shouted. Metal banged. They were relocating all their tents to here, right within sight of the compound. No more hiding and playing coy.

I heard Agent Sanders’s voice, magnified into a giant’s deep shout, roll in a wave across the distance. “You in the dome,” he said. “I want to talk to the leader of the Church of the New World in this location.”

No response. I lifted my head and took reckonings. The access road was less than ten feet ahead of us, and to the left was a cleared open area, dirt only, neat as if it had been cordoned off by nature herself. The supply drop. That meant that at least one access was located right there, as close as possible to that spot; human nature and efficiency dictated that to be the case. One didn’t build a road and a drop point if the access was on the other side of the building.

And Pearl, I knew, would have built access in whatever ways she liked.

Follow, I whispered to both Luis and Turner, and crawled around the edge of the supply area, almost to the dome itself.

Then we waited.

It took some time. Agent Sanders repeated his request, over and over, in a bland and annoyingly exact manner. When his voice got tired, Sanders put on blaring recorded music by a singer who offended even my limited sensibilities for his lack of imagination.

And after almost half an hour, an access point opened on the dome, and a single person stepped outside.

Not Pearl, of course. I didn’t recognize this man. He was tall, sun-browned, lean, and with a hardened face that looked strong, but not kind. He had a bullhorn as well.

He came out of another access point, one further along the curve of the dome.

“Who are you?” he demanded, his own voice just as strong and deep as Sanders’s had been. “What do you want from us?”

As if that wasn’t obvious. The man couldn’t be oblivious to the abduction of children going on within his own house.

See if you can open it, I whispered to Luis, and felt him crawl past me and touch his hand to the dome near the supply drop point.

While Pearl’s spokesman and Sanders carried on their make-believe negotiations—and there was really no doubt how that would end—the area of the dome where Luis’s hand had rested suddenly belled inward, and parted with a cool whisper of air to form a circle.

Like a mouth.

I hesitated, staring at it. The last time I had entered one of Pearl’s lairs, it had almost destroyed me, and I’d been alone at the time. I hadn’t had to worry about two other lives trailing along behind me.

Luis started to enter the opening. I reached out and grabbed his arm, hard.