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By the light of my Winter sight, the park around me was transformed. No longer was I standing in the middle of a wintry snowstorm of grays and whites.
The portal into Faerie glowed red, an angry rift that had been torn in the barrier between worlds. Under normal circumstances, the Veil should have sealed itself, but something was keeping it open.
Now with my enhanced vision, I could see why.
Three conduits of arcane energy stretched from the portal itself into the theme park beyond.
One was red, like the richest of rubies. Another was emerald green, and the third was a deep purple hue. All of them flickered and shifted as power coursed along the conduit and into the portal.
This was what three-phase power in the supernatural world looked like. It had to be what was keeping the gateway open.
“You’re right,” I shouted over the snowstorm. “It’s being fed power from right here in the park. It looks like there are three sources.”
“It’s just as I feared,” Alasdair called back. “The Leanansidhe opened the portal, but she has help here on the ground.”
“Burning Hand?” I asked. It was my best guess. They’d worked together on Tangalooma, and Kaznius was in town. He’d acted like he was here to meet with Alasdair in the Yard, but as this chaos unfolded, I suspected we had found the real reason Kaznius had come.
“There is every chance,” he shouted. “Either Burning Hand or Winter Sidhe loyal to her cause. The Leanansidhe isn’t without her own followers. We need to move carefully.”
“And do what exactly?” I asked, as I tried to trace the conduits of power to their origins deeper in the park.
“If we want to close this portal, we’re going to have to sever the power that is feeding it.”
And to do that, we were going to have to contend with the creature who had come through it, along with any of her other allies lurking in the park. The amusement park was an ambusher’s paradise, and we were considerably outnumbered.
Walking to the edge of the rift, I traced the beams of energy to their source. I needed to know where we were heading.
One of the beams lanced through the sky, branching off to our right. It seemed to be coming from the giant new roller-coaster that had been recently constructed.
Named the Leviathan, the mammoth timber-framed roller-coaster dominated the new Atlantis-themed portion of Sea World. The beam of emerald energy ran right into the timber and steel mass at its heart.
The ruby red arc of power seemed to be coming from one of the animal exhibits on the western side of the park. Perhaps the polar bear enclosure or Shark Bay.
The rich purple beam vanished into the horizon, clearly coming from the far end of the park. That on its own was a worry. For a ritual to maintain power over such a distance, it spoke volumes to the magnitude of energy involved.
A sharp shooting pain pierced my skull, and I closed my eyes as I gripped my temples with both hands.
I’d overdone it.
I still wasn’t used to using my Winter sight for prolonged periods, and the strain on my body was intense.
If I wasn’t careful, it would leave me with a migraine that would take days to shift. If I pushed past the warning signs, the backlash was strong enough to knock me out cold.
“The portal is being powered by three conduits from within the park,” I called as I rubbed at my temples. “If we are to seal it, we’ll need to sever them, but that means venturing deeper into the park. And we still have the children with us.” We needed somewhere we could hide them, but I had no idea where they might be safe. I doubted they would be safer outside where panicked patrons stampeded. At least in the park, I could keep an eye on them. And while Conor may not understand his own power, I’d seen it for myself. He’d summoned a storm. We might need his help.
“We aren’t leaving the children behind,” I replied. “We still have no idea what else is out there. We’re going to have to bring them with us until we can find somewhere to hide them where they’ll be safe.”
Even as I said the words, I didn’t like the idea one bit but as far as I could see, we didn’t really have any other choice.
The Leanansidhe and her agents could be anywhere, including among the park’s own patrons. Our only chance of keeping the children safe was to take them with us.
Alasdair and I rushed back across the ice. The snowstorm lashed at our backs as we raced back to the kids. When we reached the edge of the lake and climbed up the rocky shore, my heart stopped. A puddle of viscous red liquid pooled across the stage.
At first, I thought it was coming from the yeti and our earlier fight but there was too much of it, and Alasdair had reduced the yeti to a pile of ashes.
Then I noticed the bloody paw prints trailing off the stage toward the grandstand. I raced out of the mist, shouting for my children.
“Shay, Conor? Where are you?”
“We’re over here, Mum,” Shay’s voice called from beside the grandstands.
As Alasdair and I broke through the edge of the storm, I could make out the children huddled in the shadows of the grandstand, their backs against the concrete walls.
The stands themselves were now mostly empty, and as we hurried over to the kids, I couldn’t help but notice the source of all the blood. Standing before the kids was Bran, his paws resting on the ruined carcass of a timber wolf.
I looked from the children, both of whom seemed fine—a little shaken but otherwise okay—to my dog whose gray fur was stained with blood.
“Are you all right?” I called, as I hurried over.
“We’re fine, Mum,” Shay whispered. “Bran took care of it.”
Conor was huddled against the concrete wall, his headphones on and his eyes closed.
My poor boy. I dropped to my knees in front of him and gave him a hug, squeezing him tight. “It’s okay, buddy. We’ll be all right.”
Bran nuzzled up against me, making a mess of my jeans but I didn’t care. I threw my other arm around him and hugged him tight.
“Who’s a good boy?” I asked as I rubbed his fur. He thumped his tail against the concrete, basking in the appreciation.
“I am,” a squeaky little voice called.
Sleet clung to Bran’s collar, wielding half a scraper’s blade like a miniature sword. Tiny as it was, it had a wicked edge to it.
Letting Conor go, I held Bran’s head in my hands, and looked at both Bran and Sleet.
“No matter what happens, you keep them safe. You hear me?”
Bran’s blue-gray eyes seemed to stare into my soul as he opened his jaws and let out a single bark of affirmation. Only instead of its usual throaty rumble, it roared over the lake, echoing against the storm. A shiver ran down my spine. It was a defiant warning to anyone who might cross him.
“Good boy,” I replied, ruffling his fur.
“Mum, what’s going on?” Shay asked. “Who was that woman? And why is it snowing?”
I could hear the trepidation in her trembling voice. On any other day, snow would have been a reason to celebrate. But both her and Conor looked shaken to the core.
I didn’t want to lie to them. We were all in grave danger, and hiding that from them wasn’t going to help.
“Some very bad people are here trying to cause trouble. They’ve let dangerous creatures loose in the park. And if we don’t stop them, people could get hurt.”
“Why would they do something like that?” Shay asked. “People come here to have fun.”
“That’s a very good question, little one,” Alasdair replied. “We’re going to find out the answer together. But I’m going to need you to stick with us where it is safe.”
“This sounds dangerous,” Shay replied. “Shouldn’t we run away?”
I squatted down beside her. “Running away might help us now, but it doesn’t deal with the problem. Sometimes in life you have to stand up to your problems and face them head-on.”
“But why us?” Shay asked. “Why do these things keep happening to us?”
I put my arm around her. “Because we’re special. And we have the power to do something about it.”
“With great power, comes great responsibility,” whispered Conor.
“That’s exactly right,” I replied. “And Peter Parker would never run away, would he? There are other people in this park. People who don’t have Bran to protect them. They are out there right now. Mums, dads, and little children hiding from these creatures. Hoping someone will come to save them.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” Shay asked.
Her courage in the face of her fear gave me hope.
“We’re going to find the bad people and stop them. Just like we stopped the creature who took you both, and Gran. Don’t worry, Alasdair and I will be with you.”
We helped the kids to their feet as we planned our next move.
“The first channel of energy powering the portal is coming from the animal exhibits,” I said. “Somewhere near Shark Bay, or Polar Bear Shores.”
“They have to have a ritual circle out there somewhere,” Alasdair answered. “There is no way they could sustain this much power without one. We need to find it and destroy it.”
“A ritual circle, like the one on Tangalooma?” I asked.
Alasdair nodded. “That one was particularly elaborate. They can be much simpler, from a circle of chalk to a band of metal. As long as it’s unbroken, it will suit their purposes. With this much power being conducted, we should be able to feel it at work.”
“But I thought they required a site of power, like the lake. Don’t they need somewhere to draw the power from?”
“Yes,” Alasdair answered. “That’s what has me most concerned. There is no site of power here. They have to be using something else.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“We won’t know until we find it,” he replied as he looked at the kids. His tone of voice told me he had an idea, but he wasn’t willing to voice it needlessly in front of the children. That more than anything worried me.
I figured it was the real reason Alasdair wasn’t willing to back down from the fight.
Something larger was at stake here.
We made our way over the grassy hill toward the western edge of the park. Beyond the fence was the seaway. If we were going to make our way deeper into the park, it made sense to ensure we had at least one safe flank.
“Aren’t you worried we are going to be walking into an ambush?” I asked Alasdair. “Won’t they be expecting us? The Leanansidhe saw us. I felt her stare.”
“It’s possible,” he replied. “But given we know they are out there, we have an advantage. They can’t have known we’d be here, and they have no way of knowing what we’ll do. I don’t think they came for us. If they did, why would the Leanansidhe vanish right after seeing us?”
It did seem unlikely that they knew we would be here. I hadn’t told anyone but the Old One our plans, and these rituals would have required preparation. They couldn’t have just followed us here and ad-libbed this assault on our world. The more I thought about it, the more I thought he was right.
“Actually, we’ve got two advantages,” I said as I fastened the sheath around my waist and slipped the sword into it. “We know Sea World better than just about anyone.”
Alasdair stroked his beard. “True, but they will have done their research. How can we get to the exhibits, without being seen on these paths?”
He pointed down the bitumen thoroughfares we’d already taken twice today to get to the seal show and back. They were horribly exposed and anyone watching would see us coming a mile away as we crossed the bridges that were now deserted.
“We could take that.” Shay pointed to our left, to the monorail station and the fenced off stairs leading up to it.
“But it’s not working,” Conor replied. “It hasn’t been working for months.”
He was right. The park had shut down the monorail when they’d begun constructing Atlantis. There were too many potential risks for running it through an active construction site.
I wrapped my arm around Shay. “That’s a brilliant idea.”
No doubt the carriages had been shut off, and we wouldn’t be able to use them. But there was nothing stopping us from using the rail itself to move around the park. It was large and flat and for most of its length, wasn’t that high above the ground.
If the Leanansidhe’s forces thought it was out of commission, it would be the last place they would think of checking. With a handful of stations around the park, it would allow us to move quickly while remaining out of sight. And it would give us a bird’s-eye view of what was going on.
It might actually allow us to catch whoever was conducting these rituals by surprise.
“Let’s go.” Alasdair made a beeline for the nearest station.
On the ground floor, a rickety gate had been padlocked shut, but it was only two feet tall and clearly relied on the presence of park staff to keep unwanted patrons out.
We climbed over it and raced up the stairs, only to find the door to the railway station itself locked tight.
Not to be discouraged, Alasdair placed his hand over the lock and whispered something beneath his breath.
The release of power was tangible. The lock, and a six-inch portion of the steel door around it, was reduced to molten slag by Alasdair’s fire magic.
“That is so cool,” Conor said as the superheated steel pooled at our feet.
It was times like this I was grateful Conor didn’t seem to grasp the extent or presence of his powers. The concept of what might amuse a teenage boy frankly frightened me.
“That’s nothing,” Alasdair replied. “Before the day’s through, I’ll show you some real fireworks.”
I hit him on the back.
“Behave,” I hissed. I didn’t need him encouraging Conor to embrace powers he couldn’t yet control.
We slipped inside the monorail station and Alasdair shoved the door closed behind us. Not that it would keep anyone out now that he had completely obliterated the lock, but at least at a distance it would appear undisturbed if the Leanansidhe’s forces were looking for us.
The platform itself was in disrepair. Most surfaces were covered in dust, and the monorail shuttle stood lightless and lifeless on the rail.
By the station office sat a wheelchair that hadn’t been used in some time, so I grabbed it and wedged it against the door to make it harder to push open.
It wasn’t going to stop a yeti, but it might stop a child from wandering onto the platform. Even as I jammed the door, I had the terrifying image in my mind of the yeti confronting us on the monorail track, while we stood over the top of one of the animal exhibits.
A chill ran down my spine.
Falling into the stingray pools would cause little problem. Even on a bad day, you could pat them in their shallow pools. Stingrays had only killed a handful of people in human existence and none of them at Sea World, but falling into the polar bear enclosure or Shark Bay itself could prove problematic.
“Just trying to keep our enemies beneath us, rather than behind us,” I said to Alasdair.
“Good thinking,” he replied.
I walked to the edge of the station and looked out over the park. Behind us, the lake still resembled a nightmarish hellscape. The wintry storm lashing about the open portal continued unabated.
It dawned on me as I stood there—one of the problems with leaving the lake was that we had no idea what else might come through the portal.
By my count, we still had a yeti, a banshee, and timber wolves to contend with, along with whoever was helping the Leanansidhe. The longer it stayed open, the more outnumbered we could become.
But if the only way to shut the portal was to sever the power keeping it open, we had to take that chance.
There was a part of me that hoped my father might actually regain control of his realm and the creatures in it. If we were lucky, perhaps he could close it down from Faerie. But the rest of me was equally convinced that was just wishful thinking. I hadn’t been able to rely on my father for anything else in my life. At forty-two, I could hardly expect him to solve my problems now.
If we wanted this rift shut, it was up to us.
I pointed to the portal. “What’s going to happen when word of this mess gets out?”
“What do you mean?” Alasdair asked.
“Well, it’s easy for people to ignore a magical occurrence that can be explained away. A spell here, an incantation there. But a thousand people just saw a rift to the Otherworld open and a horde of magical creatures pour out of it. We can’t explain that away as a shared delusion.”
“No, we can’t,” Alasdair replied. “There is going to be hell to pay, and I suspect the Congress is going to have its work cut out for it. But politicking and arse-covering is their mess, not ours. We take out the trash and leave them to deal with what I suspect will be a very pissed off Parliament House.”
Alasdair planted his hands on his hips. “I’ll tell you what though. I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for this mess when the Congress catches up with them.”
“Why?” I asked. “What will happen to them?”
“Well, years ago, when the supernatural world existed in secret, before that mess in New York City, just doing magic in front of normals was enough to warrant a death sentence. Things might be a little different now, but willingly unleashing the supernatural world on unsuspecting civilians? The Congress will have no mercy. The Leanansidhe is burning the boats. If they do not succeed, the Congress is going to grind them to dust.”
I thought of the Old One’s warning and the fact Kaznius was in town. Was Alasdair aware that his childhood savior was likely the muscle behind the Leanansidhe’s scheme?
I didn’t want to reveal I had been speaking about him to the Old One, so I let it slide. There was no point dredging it up if it could be avoided. Besides, there was always the chance that it was a coincidence and the Leanansidhe had brought her own muscle. For all I knew, we were dealing with a contingent of the Winter Sidhe. No need to imagine other foes when we had plenty of them in front of us already.
Staring into the distance, I drew on my Winter sight. I wanted to make use of the added elevation of the monorail platform to get a feel for the origin of the conduit powering the portal.
The ruby red conduit arced overhead and straight into Shark Bay.
Wonderful. Why couldn’t it have been coming from the penguin exhibit?
The emerald conduit ran straight to the heart of the mammoth rollercoaster in the Atlantis section of the park, and the purple conduit trailed off into the distance. Its origin was not visible, even at this height.
I turned to my teenagers.
“Okay, here’s how this is going to work. We’re going to make our way along this track.”
Shay glanced at the steel rail, her face twisted with uncertainty.
“I know you don’t like heights, baby. But you can’t stay here. I can’t protect you if I can’t see you. But don’t worry, for most of the park, the monorail isn’t much higher than the roof of our house. In some places, it’s even lower. If we get too scared, we can jump off, but for now I need you to trust me and I need you to come with me.”
Shay swallowed but said nothing. I put my arm around her shoulders.
“You can do this. We can do this. We are going to make our way along the rail to Shark Bay. But I want you, Conor, and Bran to stay behind us. Out of sight of anyone who might try to cause us harm. Once Alasdair and I have cleared the way, we’ll signal for you to follow us, all right?”
“Got it,” Conor said.
He was dealing with this surprisingly well. He usually didn’t do well with change, or loud noises, or new experiences.
But he was wearing his headphones and there was a chance that, to him, this all felt like a game. I wasn’t entirely sure he was aware of just how much danger we were in.
I already had one terrified child to contend with. I didn’t need another. So I counted my blessings, took a deep breath, and stepped out onto the monorail track. It was several feet wide so nothing like walking a tightrope but as we left the station, the three-and-a-half-meter drop to the ground was still a little daunting.
Not enough to kill us but certainly enough to hurt if we lost our footing.
“Eyes up,” I said, mostly for my own benefit as we made our way tentatively out onto the track.
Alasdair fell in behind me while the kids waited at the edge of the station for me to give the all clear.
It wasn’t until we made our way out over the jellyfish exhibit that I realized just how exposed we were. Anyone looking up would surely see us silhouetted against the sky.
There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that. I couldn’t conceal us all with a glamor. I’d been practicing, but that was still a pipe dream.
“Sleet?” I whispered. “Are you still there, buddy?”
“Yes,” came the high-pitched reply from my pocket.
“I need your help, buddy.”
He stood up, looking over my pocket. “What can Sleet do?”
“There are some bad guys over there.” I pointed to Shark Bay. “I need you to take a look around and let us know if anyone is watching the track. I don’t want to walk into an ambush.”
“Got it, Nora.” Sleet pulled himself out of my pocket but before he took off, I put out my hand to stop him.
“These are very bad people, Sleet. Be careful. Don’t be seen and if you are, you need to run, okay?”
“Got it,” Sleet said with a smile. “Sleet is very good at hide and seek. They’ll never find me.”
“That’s my boy,” I replied as I lifted him up and hoisted him into the air. He took off into the distance, flying far quicker than we could walk.
Knowing he was scouting ahead of us gave me some measure of reassurance. No part of me wanted to get ambushed on the track with nowhere to run, and a precarious drop on either side.
Alasdair and I stalked in silence past Stingray Cove, and as we did, we waved the children onto the track.
Mother of the year, right here, but there was little other choice. I pointed back at the jellyfish enclosure, signaling where I wanted them to wait.
It was a sealed building housing hundreds of species of jellyfish. If they waited on top of it, there was no risk of a fall. If anything happened, they could simply hide out on the roof of the building. We crept forward, closing on Shark Bay.
Shark Bay was ringed by a massive rock wall, obscuring views from the outside world.
As we neared the edge of the wall, I dropped to my knees and lowered myself onto my chest, commando crawling forward.
It was slow going but it made us practically invisible to anyone in the enclosure below.
Sleet hadn’t returned, which was starting to cause me to worry. What if something had happened to him? What if they’d caught him?
Slowly but surely, I inched my way forward, peering over the edge of the rail. As I cleared the rock wall, I got my first view of the enemy, and the source of the first conduit powering the gateway.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I whispered as I took in the disaster forming in Shark Bay.