14

THE EVIL WITHIN

The grid around the shop was formed of specially chosen crystals placed at strategic intervals along every wall, and even in the ceiling. Now they wailed in protest, as if they were under tremendous pressure from all directions at once. That had never happened before.

As the pressure built, it pounded on Dru’s skull. She had to blink to clear her vision. “We have to bolster the strength of the grid,” she yelled over the noise, motioning to Greyson. “I need your help!”

She led him to a knee-high mountain of smoky quartz in the corner, the biggest crystal she had. She put her palm flat against its cold, rough-hewn point. Immediately, she felt its protective frequency humming against her skin. She pushed as much of her own magic into the crystal as she could, making it light up from within.

She held out her other hand to Greyson, and he took it. Immediately, their fingertips sparked as his arcana rasa power flowed into her, doubling her efforts. It should have been enough. She felt the quartz tremble as it was pinned between their combined power and whatever was assaulting it from outside.

But no matter how hard she pushed, she kept losing ground. The crystalline shriek grew deafening. The overhead lights flickered. The air itself trembled. With a shock that jolted her whole body, the invisible field that surrounded them shattered.

The force of its destruction flung her away from the massive quartz crystal. Magical sparks danced around it, scorching her sleeve, filling the sudden silence with the foul smell of singed rock.

Greyson caught her before she fell, and she clung to him, pulse pounding in her ears.

“D!” Rane’s metallic voice rang out as she took Dru’s free arm, steadying her. “What happened?”

Dru shook her head. Her throat was suddenly dry, and she had trouble forming words. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

Then the power went out. All at once, the lights flickered and died, leaving them in darkness. The faint background hum of nearby electrical devices faded away into a stifling silence. Dru could hear the sound of her own rushed breathing, and her own quickening pulse. “There are flashlights under the cash register.”

Greyson’s boots scraped across the floor, and he dug under the cash register. There was a rapid clicking sound, but no light. He slammed things down on the counter. The landline phone clattered. “Everything’s dead.”

Rane felt her way toward the front end of the store, metal feet clanging, making the inventory rattle on the shelves. “It’s a blackout. The whole block is dark!”

Even as the oncoming rush of fear paralyzed Dru to the spot, the detached analytical part of her was grudgingly impressed. The crystal grid she had painstakingly assembled around the perimeter of the shop was formed of the strongest crystals she could find, carefully matched to multiply their protective powers.

For someone—or something—to overpower the entire grid at once and shut it all down required more than just a colossal amount of sheer might. It also required a coordinated effort from multiple fronts, simultaneously. A group of some kind. Not only powerful but also highly intelligent, magically literate, and working together.

They had to be, in order to find enough weaknesses in her defenses to exploit them all at once. In other words, whoever or whatever was out there, they were a terrifyingly powerful team.

They. Wraiths, plural.

Her stomach knotted up. Things were rapidly spinning out of control. The crystal grid was their key defense. They couldn’t last without it. Was it already too late to run?

She reached out for Greyson, but couldn’t find him in the dark. She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and tried to turn on its flashlight. But the phone was dead in her hand, as if its battery had been completely drained.

Abandoning the phone, she pulled out her sunstone and willed it to life. The low angle of its hot light threw long, sharp shadows in strange directions, transforming the shop from a familiar sanctuary into an eerie tangle of shadows. She turned to Greyson. “You were right. We need to get out of here. Before they get inside.”

Rane’s metal face shimmered with disbelief. “They? I thought there was just the one wraith.”

“So did I. But one entity couldn’t do it alone. Their magic had to come from at least four different directions at once. Maybe more. We’re outnumbered.” She touched the knee-high quartz crystal in the corner, trying to light it up, but it responded with only a faint watery flicker within its depths. A chill shivered through her. “They didn’t just take the grid down. They drained it. They consumed the energy, somehow. It’s gone. Same with the elecricity. Like they’re feeding on it.”

Greyson glanced in the direction of the front door, then the back door. “Which way do we go?”

Rane pointed at the front counter and raised her sledgehammer. “D! It’s moving!”

On the cluttered countertop, next to a beat-up calculator and a secondhand stapler, sat the golden cat’s eye crystal. Before, it had been so utterly inert and useless that Dru had convinced herself it didn’t work. But now, it twitched inside its nest of crumpled copper.

Dru felt her hair stand up. Heart pounding, she forced herself to take one wary step closer, and then another, watching the white-hot slit of the cat’s eye flicker toward her and then turn away, like a frightened animal looking for an escape route.

She bent over it, her mouth dry, her palms growing damp. The cat’s eye shivered and rattled inside its base. The bright slit looked left, right, then behind her.

Carefully, she picked it up. The crudely shaped metal base felt uncomfortably warm in her hand, and it smelled of pungent herbs. She held it out at arm’s length and aimed it at the front door. The eye fixed in that direction, trembling in its base.

Then she turned to check the back door.

The eye changed directions.

Dru’s heart thudded faster. “They’re out front and out back.” She tried to keep her voice steady, but it still trembled with fear. In her hand, the cat’s eye likewise picked up speed, vibrating faster. Dru turned around in a slow circle. The eye locked in not only on the front door and the back door but also at several points along each wall. It didn’t make sense.

“Where the hell are they?” Rane spun on her heel, her head swiveling in all directions. “I can’t see them. How can I hit them?”

Greyson shook his head suddenly, as if a swarm of insects was buzzing around him. He picked up his crowbar and turned grimly to Dru. “They’re here. Now.”

“The front door’s clear,” Rane called, and then ran past them toward the back door, lugging the sledgehammer. “Back door’s clear. Where are they?”

“Come on.” Greyson took Dru’s arm and steered her toward the back. “Get the scroll. We just need to run for it.”

She resisted. “What if they’re invisible? They could be anywhere. We could run right into them.” Which would be fatal. The thought made Dru’s blood run cold.

Greyson hesitated.

In her palm, the cat’s eye spun in all directions, throbbing faster. “This thing is acting like they have us surrounded.”

Rane came back to join them, breathing heavily. Every steel muscle in her body was bunched with tension. “Where?” The word rang out as if she had shouted it through a megaphone.

Dru tried to gauge the vibration of the frantic cat’s eye. It sped up to a constant, unsettling buzz in her palm. “They’re getting closer.”

“How close? Inside the shop?”

Dru had the irresistible urge to swallow, but her throat was too tight. “I don’t know.”

She looked from Greyson to Rane and back, and saw her confusion mirrored on their faces. And then, at last, she knew what the cat’s eye was trying to tell her. She looked up.

* * *

In the woods, Feral waited for Rane’s reply, but it never came. His thumbs flew across the keyboard, trying again and again.

He sat in total silence, his muscles aching with tension. There was no reply.

He tried again. Still no answer.

She had gone silent. That wasn’t like her.

He tried calling her instead. Immediately, her voicemail greeting spilled out into his ear: “Yo, my phone’s off, so—”

He hung up. Her phone wasn’t off. Something was wrong.

He shut off his phone, stuffed it back in the bag, and buried it under the pine needles. Gritting his teeth, he brought on the change. His vision flickered with a brilliant green light as the wolf took over.

In a blur of gray and tan fur, he exploded out of his hiding place, teeth bared. He charged through the woods on four swift paws, following the winding riverbank. He had to get to the shop and find Rane. As tough as she was, there was no way she could take on the Harbingers and live to tell about it.

He had to warn her. Unless it was already too late.

* * *

By the time night blissfully blanketed the street and the temperature on the sweltering rooftop dropped down to tolerable levels again, Salem was done with waiting and watching. He wanted to saunter right into the shop, take back the apocalypse scroll with his usual flair, and win Rane back to his side of the table.

He knew he could seize the scroll by force. But he was still no closer to figuring out how he would regain Rane’s sympathies. Being injured didn’t carry the same weight it once did. Pure logic had failed miserably. Perhaps an overwhelming display of power would catch her attention. It had worked before.

He felt the bandages around his aching ribs and grimaced, thinking hard and getting nowhere.

Then the lights went out. Everywhere.

The friendly golden glow in the windows that lined both sides of the street winked out instantly. The streetlights above them lingered on a moment longer until they, too, died. The only holdouts were the blue and red neon lights of the liquor store next door, which fizzled and held onto their ghostly luster briefly before succumbing.

The street below became a pit of darkness beneath a sky still lit to an insubstantial non-color by the surrounding city. So presumably, the blackout was localized around Dru’s shop. Maybe a truly unfortunate coincidence.

But Salem didn’t put much stock in coincidences.

Wincing, he got up off the bench and stood, leaning on the waist-high brick wall. He flexed his hands, limbering up his long fingers, feeling the knuckles pop. The hot hum of magic raced across his palms, itching to be released.

Something was coming. He could almost taste it.

He didn’t have to wait long. On the street below, a vaguely predatory shape glided through the incomplete darkness toward the blocky shape of Dru’s building. Just a flutter of motion, nothing more.

Something fluttered against the back of Salem’s neck. Fearing the worst, he snatched at it, but it was just the dangling end of the bandages wrapped around his head. They were coming loose. With grim determination, he pulled them off and tossed them aside, then carefully nestled his silk top hat in place and tapped it down.

It was time to destroy that wraith, once and for all. This time, he wouldn’t let it get the best of him. He was ready to finish this.

Sparks sizzled and crackled between his eager fingers.

Then he saw more motion on the far side of Dru’s shop, coming around the corner. And even more slipping up over the roof, converging from different directions. A cluster of wraiths, faintly phosphorescent, twisting and twining in the darkness, each one more than a match for any of those inside.

Salem could practically feel the blood draining from his face. One wraith, he could handle. But there were too many. Three, four, maybe even half a dozen of them. He couldn’t be sure. All he knew for certain was that suddenly the situation had reversed. Instead of teaming up against a single wraith, now they were the ones who were badly outnumbered.

And Rane was down there, surrounded.

He pulled out his phone to call Ember, intending to use her teleportation powers for a lightning-fast rescue. But he realized with a stab of fear that the phone was drained of power. Dead. Just as the rest of them would be as soon as those wraiths entered the shop.