Nim’s stomach churned as she imagined the buildings collapsing, trapping people inside, the bridges swaying and dumping cars and pedestrians into the unforgiving cold of the bay.
As if in response to her dread, the soil around her warmed. That gave her an idea. She sent the tendrils and ropes of magic she’d sent into the earth to encase the spears of rock-like matter, from where they pierced through the topsoil down to where they emerged out of the solid sheet of rock that was the mountain. It was as if she poured sand into a bowl of long, slim stones, the sand filling the space between.
“I think I can hold it and stop it from reacting to you,” she told Trajan, tipping her head up to look at him. “Can you get yourself out?”
Trajan looked at her, and Nim was keenly aware that she was kneeling, trapped in the soil, while he loomed over her like a vengeful god. “If I can get out of my boots, I might be able to pull myself up on the wind.”
“Don’t sink,” Harris warned her. “I’m going to go untie his shoes.” He popped to his feet and walked over.
“Be careful,” Nim said. “I don’t…I don’t think you should touch the stone.”
Harris crouched and looked at her over his shoulder. “When I’m not touching you, it just looks like rock.”
“What does it look like when you are touching her?” Trajan asked in alarm.
“It looks…alive.”
“Fuuuuck that,” Trajan breathed.
Nim snorted and started to laugh.
“I’m glad I entertain you,” was the Scamall witch’s dry reply.
“I’m sorry, it’s just…it’s been a weird day so far.”
“You don’t need to apologize anymore.” Harris looked up at Trajan, though he was clearly speaking to Nim.
Trajan raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. “Like I said. If I were good at my job, I would have disabled her, rescued you, and we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Nim felt something moving through the earth. That should have scared her, but it didn’t. Whatever was moving was good, friendly. A second later, vines broke through the topsoil, waving in the odd, jerky motion that once again reminded her of watching a video of a plant growing on fast forward. Harris directed the vines between the spears of stone. The soft, rounded tips of the vines twined around the laces of Trajan’s boots.
“Now that’s cool,” Trajan replied, watching. When the first boot was unlaced he started to wiggle his foot free, while Harris’s plants went to work on the second lace.
Nim once more felt that same pulsing displacement of soil as something moved through the earth, but now she recognized it as plant life growing. Whatever it was brushed against her shin and she yelped in surprise. Her concentration broke and the spears of stone each pushed up six inches higher into the air.
Harris and Trajan both yelled. Trajan raised his arms straight out to his sides. She sucked in a horrified breath. She’d thought she was just holding the stones to keep them from reacting, not to stop them from rising any higher into the air.
The spears along the outsides and front of his legs were slightly angled in and now rose to his hips, leaving only an inch of space between the sharp tips and his pants. The spears between his legs were now at mid-thigh, perilously close to his femoral artery.
Harris had yelled because as the stone shot up, it severed the vines he’d been using to work on the laces of Trajan’s second boot. He fell back onto his ass, one hand pressed to his head.
“Stop it,” Trajan snarled at her.
A sharp gust of wind whipped down the hill, smacking against her left side with enough force to make her wince. “It wasn’t me! My magic slipped, for just a second.”
Trajan’s wind died. “You didn’t make them grow?”
“No.” She sucked up power from the earth only to shape it with her will and pour it out again, filling the soil around and under Trajan, exerting downward pressure on the spears of rock. Colors muted as her eyes began to glow.
“I’m trying to hold it. If it were stone, real stone, I could reach into it, manipulate it, but I can’t. It’s like…it’s like each of those things is wrapped in hard plastic and my magic can’t get through.”
Harris had stopped rubbing his head, and blinked, looking over his shoulder at Nim. He blinked again, then looked away, his cheeks going slightly pink.
Nim bent her head to look at herself. Trajan’s gust of wind had pulled the tie of her wrap dress loose, and the dress was no longer closed in the front. The fabric dangled off her sides like curtains, but her naked, hanging breasts were clearly on display. Half-sunk into the earth as she was, she couldn’t do anything about the dress.
She looked at Trajan. “Really?”
His hands, already raised, turned up, and he shrugged. “That was an accident.”
“Really?”
For the first time he smiled, really smiled, and it was devastating. He had a dimple. “A happy accident.”
“Quid pro quo, buddy. Once you’re free I expect the pants to come off.”
Trajan and Harris both looked at her. She smiled sweetly. “Fair’s fair.”
“I don’t want to be mean, but could both of you shut up?” Harris asked. He hadn’t sounded that irritated when he’d first woken up from being kidnapped.
“Harris? What’s wrong?”
Fresh vines broke through the earth. This time he had to coax them to grow nearly a foot tall before he could direct them between the space between the sharp rocks, which had widened as they rose, creating a solid barrier of stone at ground-level.
“When the vines cut, I…I felt it.”
Trajan was staring down at him. “And that’s…bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. A living thing died. Was murdered by these weird, evil rocks.”
“I’m sorry,” Nim said.
“Stop apologizing,” Harris snapped.
No one spoke for a long time. From her position on her hands and knees, half-buried in the earth, Nim couldn’t see what was going on. She pulled up magic through her shins, knees, and feet, shaped it as it passed through her body, and sent it out into the ground through her hands.
“Almost done,” Harris murmured, and she realized Trajan might not even be able to see his feet due to the way the spikes at his toes were angled in toward his thighs.
Nim had forced herself to keep her concentration on wrapping power around the base of the stones-like things, stopping them from rising any farther. If they did, they would start impaling Trajan.
It was hard, but not because of the amount of power she was using. In fact, she was pulling and pushing more power than she ever had before, and doing it without the benefit of a circle.
Harris must have been coaxing backup vines through the soil, because the twisting, slithering sensation of slender, snake-like things moving through and around her legs and wrists was making her shiver. She was not a squeamish person—she didn’t fear spiders or bugs, with the exception of that dragonfly—but there was something about that soft, unseen slither that now set her teeth on edge, when the first time it had only startled her.
Harris, still kneeling before Trajan, spoke in a low voice. “When the vines were cut, it was as if I was cut. As if my finger had been cut off. I’ve been tending fields when they were mowed and it felt nothing like this. I don’t know if it’s because we’re in this weird place, or because of whatever these rocks are, but I… I don’t want to feel that again.”
Nim firmed her jaw. “I won’t let go.” And she also wouldn’t complain about how creepy it felt to have his roots and vines winding around her limbs.
“Done.” Harris sat back and bowed his head for a moment. His shoulders sagged in clear exhaustion.
The wind picked up, and Nimue shivered. Trajan, arms still carefully held out to his sides, was wiggling in his boots.
“Wait,” Harris said, “I don’t think you should use your magic.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but just…don’t.” The grim tone was so unlike Harris that Nim’s stomach knotted with worry. That worry only increased when Harris crawled over to the closest sapling and laid his hand on it. With truly frightening speed it grew into a nearly full-sized tree, one branch thicker and faster than the rest. When he was done there was a fat, leafy branch two feet above Trajan’s head.
“Can you pull yourself out?” Harris asked.
Trajan didn’t immediately reach for the branch. “Is this supposed to be an apple tree?”
Harris and Nim both tipped their heads, trying to see what Trajan was looking it. She got only the briefest glimpse of a few solid-gold apples through the verdant leaves.
“Um…” Harris pursed his lips.
“Right. Well. One problem at a time.” Trajan grabbed the branch, and with an impressive show of upper-body strength lifted himself straight up. His feet came free of his boots, and he hoisted himself up, pulling his knees to his chest as he swung up into the tree.
He was almost clear when one of his feet dropped just a bit lower than the other as he let go with one hand, reaching up to grab the next branch.
She shouted a warning, but it was too late. His sock caught on the jagged point of the tallest spear. Trajan’s leg came up in a sharp knee thrust and then he disappeared fully into the tree.
Harris was on his feet. “Trajan?”
The leaves rustled and then Trajan dropped down beside Harris. He immediately sat, yanking off his sock.
“Did you get cut?” Nim asked desperately. She wasn’t sure why the idea scared her so much, but she was sure that if he had touched the not-stones, if the sharp edge had pierced his skin, it would be a very bad thing.
Trajan pulled his foot up, holding it with both hands so he could peer at the bottom. “A scratch. No blood.”
Harris crouched to look. “No blood. It barely broke the skin.” He clapped Trajan on the shoulder. “You okay, man?”
Trajan took off his other sock and stood, barefoot. “Now that I’m no longer in danger of being impaled through my balls, I’m feeling a lot happier.” He threw his arm over Harris’s shoulders, giving him a one-armed hug. Harris looked surprised, but not put off.
Meanwhile, she was still holding onto the not-rocks, and kneeling half-buried and mostly naked. Nim cleared her throat. They both looked at her.
“I’m going to let go,” she warned.
Trajan dragged Harris away from the tree and the odd formation of stones. They moved until they were standing behind her.
“Cowards,” she said over her shoulder, but she was smiling.
“Yep,” Harris said.
“Absolutely,” Trajan agreed.
Nim chuckled as she closed her eyes. Without her sight she had to use her imagination to picture what she was doing—the spires of stone rising up through the soil, her magic tightly packed around each. Little by little she started to pull back, starting with the deepest magic, funneling that up to the upper layer of magic that lay just under the topsoil, hoping that by increasing the pressure on top she might be able to force them back down into the earth. If she let go they’d shoot up and stab Harris’s tree, and given how he’d said having them sever one tiny little vine had felt like a finger being chopped off, she couldn’t imagine what several severed branches would feel like.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, and her task was made harder because for some reason Harris was still messing around with the vines. She felt them slithering and sliding against her. Biting down on the urge to jerk up and brush at her skin to get rid of the feeling, she continued trying to push down on the spikes of not-stone. Ever so slowly, they receded, retreating into the earth. She was connected to the granite core of the mountain, and tried to have it pull the spires back into itself, but there was no response to her prompting, almost as if the rock didn’t recognize the spires as being a part of it.
Finally she had almost all the power she’d poured into the stone concentrated in a circle near the surface. She opened her eyes, expecting to see only the sharp, blade-like tips still protruding.
The not-stone spires were unchanged. The multisided gray and black flecks of the granite continued to shift and flow within the shapes.
“Damn it,” she gasped. She’d felt them recede. She’d been sure of it.
“What’s wrong?” Trajan asked.
Harris knelt beside her and laid a hand on her back. There was a brief pause, then his hand slid up between her shoulder blades, brushing aside the hair on her neck. He pressed two fingers to the skin above the collar of her dress, and sucked in a breath.
“Touch her bare skin,” Harris told Trajan.
“Excuse me?” Nim said coldly.
“I’m not going to touch her without an invitation,” Trajan said. Nim instantly liked him a bit more than she had even five minutes before.
“I…didn’t mean it…like that. I—” Harris bumbled to a stop and sighed. “You can feel the rock moving if you’re connected to her. Earlier I had my arm around her—to stop her from sinking, not because I was trying to cop a feel—and my, uh, finger, slid inside her top and I…” Another bumbling stop.
Trajan knelt on Nim’s other side. “Give me a minute,” she yelped, not ready to have Trajan’s hands on her.
“What’s wrong?” Harris asked.
If only that hideous creepy-crawly feeling of the vines sliding over her would stop. It was making her anxious, so anxious that she spoke the truth when she otherwise would have instead replied with some caustic retort.
“I’m kneeling, half buried, and unable to get up without risking my hold on some evil magic stone spikes, in between two men who are both physically stronger than I am. And now you’re both going to have your hands on me and it’s just a lot, okay?”
Harris immediately jerked his hand off her neck. “Nim, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She was trembling, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the strain of her magic or the very feminine fear that gripped her. All she could do to reply to Harris was to shake her head.
“What are you trying to work?” Trajan asked briskly.
That jerked her focus back to the problem at hand. “I was trying to push the spikes back into the earth. The granite core of the mountain won’t pull them back, and it should.”
“Can you break them?”
Nim considered that. “I…maybe. Not the way I normally would with a stone, but maybe if I made a flat disk of magic I can cut through them at ground level.”
Trajan’s voice was no-nonsense. “Good. How do you do your workings, words, imagery?”
“Combination, but mostly imagery. What you said before about breathing made sense.”
“Then envision the disk, but make it spin, like a saw blade. Don’t break them, cut through them.”
Nim turned her head to the side so she could look at him. Her hair fell in her face. She tried to toss it back, but it slid forward again. Trajan very carefully gathered her hair in his hand and laid it on her back. Their gazes met, and something passed between them.
Trust. He’d trusted her to hold off the spikes. And now she was trusting him enough to do what he said.
“I didn’t mean to call those,” she whispered, still holding his piercing blue gaze. She was once more keenly aware of the fact that she was half naked, but for an entirely different reason. When Trajan looked at her, it was as if no one else existed, as if she had his entire focus.
“What were you trying to do?”
“Encase you in dirt.”
Harris laughed from her other side, but it sounded forced. She turned to face him, her hair falling over that side of her face. He looked at her, then his gaze shifted to Trajan before sliding away.
Nim’s heart started to pound.
“Maybe you should touch me,” she said slowly, “while I try this. Both of you.”
For a second neither of them moved, but then Trajan reached out and gathered her hair in his hands, twisting it into a rope and laying it down the center of her back. He placed his hand on her shoulder, all but his pinky finger resting on cloth. His smallest finger lay on the soft skin at the base of her neck. Harris did the same, but his touch was tentative, and he stroked her neck with the tips of all his fingers before laying his hand on her shoulder.
She shivered when he stroked her, and once more she was highly aware of the two strong men on either side of her. It was no longer fear that pulsed through her, but desire. For both of them.
“That is deeply fucked up,” Trajan said.
For a horrified moment she thought she’d admitted her attraction to both of them out loud. She turned her head slightly to look at Trajan, only to see that he was staring at the stone spires, not her.
Relief that she had kept her thoughts to herself startled a little laugh out of her, which helped dispel some of her tension. They must have thought she was laughing at his comment.
“I’ll hold onto the tree,” Harris told her.
“Why?”
“If you’re going to make a magical saw blade, you might slice through some roots.”
Trajan grunted. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But my magic shouldn’t be able to touch the plants,” she protested. “The stones are a real, physical construct—magical, sure, but still physical, which is why they cut your vine, but I’m going to be working in pure magic.”
“Whatever it was that we did when we combined our magic, I’m pretty sure it included somehow transferring one another a bit of each other’s power. I think that might be why we’re all using magic, touching each other, and there’s no reaction.”
Nim hummed her agreement. “You’re right. I forgot.”
“There’s a lot going on,” was Trajan’s dry comment.
“Okay, here goes nothing.” Nim sent her awareness along the thick lines of magic that flowed from her hands through the earth, carried by the soil and minerals that were her elements. When she connected her awareness with the dense cylinder of magic she’d formed around the underground base of the spikes, her skin started to prickle. She’d packed tons of power into a small space. That thought sparked another.
What had happened to all the magic she’d stored in the soil under her crops?
That moment of distraction was all it took. The stone swords each shot up another foot. The sharp points of the tallest of them were now almost touching. Trajan made a pained noise. If he’d been standing there he would have been skewered.
“That wouldn’t have been good,” Harris said in a bland voice.
Ignoring them, she forced her attention back to the well of power she’d condensed against the roots of the strange not-stone spears.
“A flat, horizontal disk,” Trajan squeezed her shoulder as he spoke. “Spinning so fast that the edge of it becomes razor-sharp, and the force is enough to cut through stone.”
She let his words flow through her, but if she expanded the magic into a large flat disk like a saw blade, the outer cutting edge would be outside the circle of stones. Instead she imagined a tiny circle of magic, about the size of a quarter, in the small space between the innermost spires and Trajan’s still-captured boots. The rest of the magic hung down from the disk in a long, soft column that was something between a rope and a tendril of underground smoke.
She imagined the quarter starting to spin, so fast that the earth would be hot from the friction.
Nothing happened.
The stone spires started to grow again as her focus shifted. The tips of the two tallest clacking together, and then fusing into one rather than breaking. The strange, fluid movement of the inner material of the stone accelerated from the lazy bubbles of a lava lamp to the roiling of boiling water.
“No good, not good,” Harris chanted.
There was a gust of magic-tinged wind. A fist of air slammed straight down onto the stone. Thick-skinned, thorny vines sprouted aggressively from the soil, weaving between and around the spires.
Connected as they were, she could feel their magic, feel the foreign yet familiar tingle of energy and ozone. They were helping, because she was failing. The earth trembled as she sank an inch deeper, the soil damp and rich as it pulled her in.
Though she didn’t need tools or words to use her earth magic, it sometimes helped. She pulled in a breath that made her nose and tongue tingle, laced as it was with Trajan’s and Harris’s magic, and said, “Ar mo mhíle dícheall.”
The words were Irish, a language she didn’t speak, a place that was not the root of her power, but Irish immigrant practitioners had built the foundations of the world of magic in North America as it was now. The cabals had all taken their names from Irish words, and use and belief had given words spoken in that tongue a nearly universal effectiveness.
To the utmost of my power.
The tiny disk of magic whirled to life, spinning so fast that the thin layer of soil covering it heated, dried to dust, and blew away in Trajan’s wind, all in the course of a fraction of a second. The spinning disk started to expand, whirring to the size of a silver dollar, then a small plate. As it did, the heat turned rich, loamy soil to dust, and the wind whipped it away. She let her head fall between her arms as she concentrated.
“Goddess.” Harris’s vines started to pull back, each carefully lifting away so they weren’t cut on the sharp edges of the not-stones. Once they were out of the way, she got a glimpse of what had put that note of reverence in his voice.
She could physically see the whirling blade of silvery-white magic. It looked as solid as the earth or the trees, though that wasn’t possible. It was just magical construct, with no physical form.
The widening blade hit the innermost stones, those that had been positioned to skewer Trajan though his testicles. The not-stone flashed silver, black, and then turned liquid and collapsed. The spinning blade flung the viscous liquid out in a splattering circle. Trajan and Harris both moved, flinging themselves forward and down so they protected her with their bodies.
Harris hissed in pain, and the hand he’d kept on her shoulder clamped down.
There was a moment’s scrambling, and wind whipped around them. “You’ve got a small burn,” Trajan reported on Harris’s injury.
“Damn, that hurts.
She should have been able to protect them. Normally it would have been easy enough to coax the soil to rise up and create a wall of earth between them and the disk, but she was fully committed to destroying the stone spires. “Can’t—protect—” She panted the words.
Either Trajan could feel that she wasn’t able to help protect them or he’d somehow inferred what the rest of her sentence would be. For a moment the wind that was pummeling the stones stopped. Then soil puffed in a circle around them, and the roar of wind muted all other sound and made her hair whip around her head.
“We’re shielded,” Trajan said, loud enough to be heard over the wind. He’d encased them inside a tube of whipping wind, and when the next stone spires fell, molten rock flinging into the air, the wind deflected it.
Power flowed through her in a strange, nearly endless loop—up through the earth, into her body, out through her hands where it tunneled down into the earth in a parallel path to its ascent, feeding the long ribbon of power she had connected to the underside of her saw blade.
Her whole body started to ache from the force of the magic being pumped through it. Harris’s roots—wrapped around her hands, wrists, lower legs, and feet—were starting to pulse and burn, probably in response to her magic. There were so many sensations buffeting her that she felt like a boat in the middle of a wild, turbulent sea, unable to tell which way was up.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she stammered. She was trying to let them know that she was at the edge of her own limits. Perhaps past her limits. She knew she’d never used this much magic at once before. She wasn’t sure she could stop the spell now even if she wanted to.
What if she couldn’t stop the spell at all?
Harris, hand still on her shoulder, bent low so he could look into her face. “You okay?”
Nim nodded, then shook her head. She no longer felt like she was in control. Her magic crackled as it started cutting through the next spires. Harris looked at her working, and together they watched as stone turned liquid, fell, and was flung off into the forest.
She sank another inch into the earth. Her arms were buried almost to her elbows. Kneeling as she had been, her lower legs and feet were entirely buried, and now the soil rose to cover several inches of her thighs.
“You’re almost there,” Harris whispered.
“Not. Sure. Stop.” She was able to gasp out the words. The blade bit into the final spires, severing them.
“Well done.” Trajan squeezed her shoulder.
The blade kept spinning. Even without Trajan’s wind to blow away the heat-and friction-dried earth, the force of the spinning was flinging dust into the air. Her magic was now a four foot diameter white disk that was still growing.
“Nimue, you need to stop.” Trajan’s voice was calm and commanding.
“I don’t think she can,” Harris told him.
Nim shook her head. “Can’t. Can’t.” The words were pants. It was getting hard to breathe.
“Pull back your magic,” Trajan ordered.
The long rope of magic dangling from the center of the disk now seemed endless. It should have been finite—but she seemed to have tapped into some deep well of earth magic, and like water flowing though a pipe, it would keep flowing unless she shut it off.
If only she knew how.
Nim’s muscles were shaking and her body felt like it was on fire. The power she’d tapped was too great—she was going to shake apart, or burn up from the inside.
Both of those were better fates than having her arms and legs amputated when the spinning disk reached her.
“Run,” she gasped. “Run.”