When I woke up the next day, I felt like the worst friend in the world.
It was nearly noon, and I was lying in bed, as if nothing had happened. Never mind that it wasn’t exactly my choice: I’d made it back to Wolfstone last night by dint of sheer refusal to pass out in the mud, but barely stayed awake long enough to give Liesel what I suspected was a horrifically confused account of the night’s events. Then my body pointed out it had given all its energy to Julian, and I went down like a boxer who took one to the jaw. And because I’d been looking forward to an exam-free morning of sleeping in, there was no alarm to wake me.
Liesel was gone. Right. Exams. But Julian didn’t have one today, so I rolled out of bed, staggered into the main room, and jabbed at my screen with a finger until it woke up and called him for me.
The first ring hadn’t even ended before the screen leapt to life—but the face on the other end wasn’t him. My heart thudded against my ribs. Robert never touched his roommate’s things. But my mouth carried on anyway, saying words I knew were useless. “I need to talk to Julian.”
Robert’s mouth twisted. “He didn’t come home last night.” His voice was low, strained.
“Didn’t—” He hadn’t taken his port to the party; it was still in his room, and if Julian had come home he would have at least picked it up. “Where is he?” I asked stupidly.
“I was hoping you could tell me that.” Too late, I heard the warning signs in Robert’s voice. “You were the last one to see him, Kim. What in seven hells happened? One minute the party is going marvelously; the next, with hardly a warning sign to raise our hackles, there’s a storm overhead that looks like the opening blast for Armageddon. We ran for cover, but before we’d even made it halfway to a building, the rain just stopped. And no one has seen Julian since.”
Fear danced along my nerves. Where could he have gone? To Grayson? Off campus entirely? “Robert, I—I don’t know what happened. You know almost as much as I do. We were just walking, and then suddenly there was something….” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Julian started to scream. I put a shield over him, only he took it over and almost burned me out—gods, he’s like a force of nature, I don’t know how he keeps it under control—but then it was gone, whatever it was. He told me to go home. Then he disappeared.”
Dead silence from the other end. Then—
“Fuck,” Robert said, and hung up.
I stared at the screen in shock. Then, furious, I dialed again. No answer. None on Robert’s port, either. I dropped my head to the desk, stayed there for several minutes, then sat up and called campus security.
~
Would I see Julian again? Yes. When? Soon. Would I get an explanation for what had happened? Maybe.
I glared at my assortment of divination tools. Some help they were. A magic eight-ball would be more useful.
Campus security had perked right up when I told them a student was attacked—until I said Julian’s name. I could practically see the word “wilder” rocket through their heads, and after that, all I got was meaningless reassurances. Not that they didn’t care about him; they just figured he could take care of himself.
And maybe he could. But I couldn’t just leave it at that.
The danger had arrived, and I couldn’t tell whether I’d been prepared or not. I’d managed a full shield; on a normal day, I would have been dancing with joy. I wasn’t sure whether it was enough, though. And my attempts to play to my usual strength were falling flat. What the hell happened to the days when I could get actual answers from my gift? Dreams I couldn’t remember, vague premonitions, a random Moon in my cards, and then that one flare, the repeated appearance of the Tower—a spotlight, shined straight into my eyes. Too blatant to miss, but too simple to tell me anything of use.
Either I’d suddenly become inept, or all of this was of a piece, a pattern I’d tried so hard to see that I missed it entirely: the future was so uncertain that no clear pattern could be seen.
Except one. The Tower.
Sudden, destructive change.
Spots swam before my eyes; I jerked and started breathing again. I put my cards into their box, my hands moving mechanically. Then I kept going, picking everything up and putting it away. Liesel would have cheered to see me being so tidy.
By the time I was done, I’d managed to put together one goal.
Find Julian.
~
Four days after Halloween, having failed at every method of finding Julian known to polite society, I threw manners out the window and went into the Arboretum.
Exams had ended, and the next term didn’t start until Monday; I had the place to myself. And though it was cold, this was the best place to work from, without anything to interfere.
I seated myself on the dead grass and rotated my head to loosen my neck. The trees surrounding me reached for the sky with skeletal branches, forming a delicate lacework arch over my head. I breathed in the stark bite of approaching winter, and sank into a trance.
Sensations dropped away one by one. I closed my eyes, focusing on the blackness behind my lids. The sigh of the wind, its cold edge against my skin, the chill of the earth beneath me, the scent that promised snow later—all faded into emptiness.
When I was ready, I sent my mind outward, casting about for any sign of Julian. It was appallingly rude—psychic spying—but I didn’t care. He’d been gone far too long. Yes, sometimes he went off on his own, but never like this. And if he was in trouble….
If he was, I didn’t know what I would do about it.
I had no chance to find out. It was a lost cause before I started; Julian’s shields put mine to shame. He could have been sitting next to me and I wouldn’t have known it. Maybe he’d gone too far away for me to reach, but if he was anywhere on Welton’s campus or even in the town, he didn’t want to be found.
Frustration rippled my trance. I breathed it down and surfaced slowly, restoring my mind to my body, then opened my eyes.
And nearly choked on my tongue.
Julian was seated cross-legged on the ground across from me. He was still wearing the boots and breeches from his costume, and the shredded remains of his shirt. It looked like he’d crawled under a few thornbushes in it. I would have wagered good money Julian hadn’t eaten in the four days since I’d last seen him.
The wind whipped strands of his hair into his eyes while I opened and shut my mouth a few times like a landed fish, searching for words. When they finally came, they weren’t pretty.
“Where the hell have you been?”
His grey eyes were as remote as the sky above us. “Around. I’m sorry, Kim.”
“Sorry? You damn well better be! What the hell happened? You get attacked by something, we get drowned without warning—and if that storm was natural, I’ll eat my PK textbook—then suddenly it’s gone, and so are you, then you don’t come home for four days, leaving us all half-dead with worry! You owe me an explanation.” I glared at him, all the more furious because he seemed so utterly composed.
“I can’t give you one.”
“Damn it, Julian—”
“I don’t know, Kim. Believe me, I’d tell you, if there was anything to tell.” Julian scrubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand. The action made him human, rather than the distant, Otherworldly being that had been sitting across from me. My anger, building since he sent me home like a child on Samhain, drained away.
“So what now?” I asked, when the silence became too much.
Julian left off his study of the dead grass, fixing his gaze on its usual spot, just below my own eyes. “I was hoping you could help me.”
“Help you? How?”
“Divination,” he said. “You’re the best I know. I need you to look for me, find out anything you can. Knowing something’s after me, that I can deal with—but I don’t know what it is. I’m hoping you can fix that.”
I almost laughed. He wanted me to help him, when I’d just figured out how useless divination was? His bleak expression stopped me, though. He needed my help. Julian, who was never frightened. Julian, who never asked for aid.
The future was mud to me, but this was a question about the here and now. That, maybe, I could get.
The snow would hold off for another good hour, if I was any judge, and this glade would serve my purposes well enough. I didn’t want to wreck what remained of my trance by running to my room, but I needed a few things….
Julian caught my key when I tossed it to him. “My silver bowl’s in the upper left drawer of the dresser. My focus ought to be on my desk. And grab my scarf—I think it’s on my bed. This coat isn’t enough.”
He was off without a word, vanishing into the forest. I passed the time by re-centering myself, preparing for my task.
After ten minutes Julian was back. He’d already filled the bowl with water from the creek. I wrapped the scarf around my neck and put the dish on the ground, letting its contents settle into stillness. My focus, the flawless quartz crystal Julian had given me for my birthday last year, hung from a silver chain. I slipped it over my head and gripped the stone in my cold hands.
Then I took a deep breath and fixed my eyes on the surface of the water, and the smooth reflection of the black tree branches overhead. The wind had died away to nothing. I collapsed in on myself, looking outward with more than natural sight.
My final impression of the outside world was of Julian, tense, wary, as if expecting another attack.
~
Consciousness came back gradually. First I became aware of sounds. After a while I identified them as voices, and was pleased with this success. My sleepy brain sorted through them and attached names: Liesel and Julian.
I decided to open my eyes. They slowly focused on a rectangle—the Celtic knotwork poster on the ceiling above my bed. I contemplated that for a while, tracing its intricate twists with my eyes, before turning my head to look at the rest of the room.
Liesel and Julian were sitting on Liesel’s tidily made bed, talking in low voices. My movement caught Julian’s eye, and he was on his feet in an instant.
“Are you all right, Kim? What happened?”
Everyone’s favorite question lately. My brow furrowed as I tried to chase down my scattered thoughts.
“Julian showed up an hour ago, right in the teeth of a snowstorm, carrying you,” Liesel said, also coming to my bedside. “You were just asleep, it seemed, but you wouldn’t wake up—”
She stopped speaking. I had my eyes fixed on Julian, waiting for some kind of answer. I remembered him appearing in the glade….
“You went rigid,” he said quietly. “I shook you, emptied the scrying bowl, took off your focus—” I could see it on my bedside table, the silver chain snapped. Emergency methods for breaking a trance. “Nothing worked,” Julian continued, mouth grim. “Until suddenly, for no reason I could see, you screamed and went limp. Right on cue, the snow started falling.”
Snow. Cold. A black void, and in it—
Now I remembered.
“Liesel, clear out,” I said curtly.
“What?”
“Leave. I need to talk to Julian alone.”
She was surprised, and a little hurt, but I couldn’t take the time to explain everything to her. She trusted me, though, and I blessed her for it. Without further ado she picked up her purse and left, shutting the door quietly behind her. There were advantages to having an empath for a roommate.
I didn’t speak immediately. Julian settled back on the edge of Liesel’s bed, looking at the floor. She’d lent him an old, faded grey sweater to replace his ruined shirt; he was lean enough that it fit. It was easy to forget that Julian was only a few inches taller than me. His physical presence was much more imposing.
“You knew.”
He shook his head, still not lifting his eyes from the floor. “Not for sure.”
I pushed myself upright and sat with my arms wrapped around my knees. My memory was clearing up all too nicely. I’d gone into trance, everything normal, looking for whatever we encountered on Samhain.
Unfortunately, I found it.
Julian raked his hands through his hair and stood, moving to stand at the window and stare outside. “I don’t know what it is, Kim. I was hoping you could learn that. But yes, I had a feeling you would find it. Where divination is concerned, you have more raw talent than almost anyone I know. And you knew what to look for; you were there for the attack. You were the only one I could ask. This gods-forsaken campus is so remote, there aren’t any other Fiain around to help me.”
“And so you tossed me out as bait?” I asked acidly.
He bent his head, gripping the windowsill until his knuckles went white. “I didn’t expect real trouble.”
That got me moving, uncurling and rising to my feet. “Trouble? That thing was waiting for me! And merrily I go, sticking my nose out, putting myself right in its path! You could have at least warned me—”
“Of what?” His laugh had nothing of humor in it. “Right now you know as much as I do. Kim, I know you’re scared, but however bad this is for you, you’re a lot safer than I am. It’s after me, not you. You just happened to be in the way.”
“Because you put me there!”
His shoulders went rigid. For a moment, I was almost afraid of what he would say. Then the tension vanished, too abruptly to be real. “You’re right.” He straightened, but didn’t face me. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”
Before I could react, he strode out the door and was gone.
~
“Argant-Dubois?”
“Here,” I said dully.
“Bailey?”
I sketched in my notebook while waiting for Domenico to finish the roll for Elemental Correspondences. My pencil produced a collage of staring eyes and spirals—hardly soothing. I hadn’t seen Julian since he left my room, four days ago.
“O….” Domenico peered at his sheet, unsure how to pronounce the next name.
“Just say Connor,” a voice said from the back of the room. I twisted around in my seat and spotted Robert Ó Conchúir, he of the infamously difficult last name. When had he come in? I hadn’t spoken to him since the day before Julian showed up. Not for lack of trying; he’d been avoiding me, and I didn’t know why.
The moment Domenico dismissed us, I leapt to my feet, but Robert had already left the room.
Undaunted, I hurried outside and saw him walking towards the end of the campus that held the Arboretum. “Robert!”
If he didn’t stop, I would chase him, and then we’d have a scene in front of all the students hurrying to their next classes. Maybe he guessed that, because he halted in the middle of the snow-crusted grass. But when I caught up with him, I found no welcome in his eyes. “Lovely friend you are.”
“What?”
“He comes to you for help, and you tell him to go hang.”
“I did not say that!”
Something broke inside him, some leash of self-control. I’d never seen Robert in such a genuine passion. “You don’t understand, do you? I’m his roommate, and that’s turned into friendship over time. But you? You’re the first one he befriended by choice. You know what it took for him to ask for help—but do you have the slightest idea what it cost him when you refused?”
His anger went through me like a knife. I actually staggered back a step, unable to face him so closely. “Robert—he almost got me killed. I know he didn’t mean to, but—”
The noise that came out of him was half-growl, half-yell. “Exactly! He put you in danger. For the love of all the gods, Kim, he’s Fiain! Endangering others is their cardinal sin, and you shoved his face in it!”
All the affectation of speech was gone. Robert’s hands were curled half into fists, and he might as well have used them on me, the effect his words had. He was right: I hadn’t understood. Not well enough. And because of it, I’d hurt Julian.
I had to fix this. “You’ve seen him. Or at least spoken to him. When?”
“Three days ago.” Robert dragged his answer down to a decent volume. “There’s been no sign of him since. If you happen to spot him—don’t screw it up again.”
This time, when Robert walked away, I made no effort to follow.
~
The final salt in the wound was that, for all my efforts, someone else found Julian before I did.
“Rafael tripped over him in the Arboretum,” Liesel told me breathlessly, two days later. “Julian was just lying there, passed out. They got him to the clinic, but nothing they did seemed to register, until suddenly he woke up on his own. And he swears blind he doesn’t remember anything from Geoff’s party onward.”
Julian, unable to remember? It made me suspicious. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. “They tested him for every drug they could think of, but he came up clean,” Liesel went on. I snorted. Julian would sooner claw his own eyes out. “No head trauma, either, physical or psychic. So they don’t have any real choice but to let him go. They can’t even file anything, since there’s no sign of any crime.”
“Haven’t they asked any of the department heads to look into it?” I asked. Surely even our thick-witted university administration would think of that.
“Madison, Fitzgerald, and Bradley. All drew a blank.”
Of course they had. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything. And while they were better than I was, I had a personal connection to the events. It wasn’t just that the future was muddy; now something was guarding the present and the past, too.
I had to go to class then. To my intense frustration, Robert didn’t show up. Our lunch habits had been broken by the new quarter, so I went to Hurst alone. I was staring at their latest offering and wondering whether it had ever been edible when I felt a presence at my side. I glanced up to see Julian—much the worse for wear.
He looked like he’d been dragged through hell, backward and face-down. After two heartbeats of staring at him like he might vanish again, I wedged my tray on the serving shelf and grabbed him by the shoulders, only just barely stopping myself from flinging my arms around him in a hug. Julian’s hand rose to grip my wrist, and if my sleeve protected me from the effect of skin contact, that touch still said more than enough.
We stayed that way for a while, ignoring the people edging around us, the not-very-quiet ripples of gossip. I could feel the bones of his shoulders through his shirt—a white shirt that played up his pallor nicely, and made the hollows below the high bones of his face that much darker. Once I collected my wits, I retrieved my tray, forced Julian to get some food, and went to sit by one of the windows. The view of the iced-over pond and dead trees was depressing, but the floor-to-ceiling glass let in plenty of the cold November sunlight. It washed out what little color Julian had to begin with, leaving him ghostlike and unreal, the way I’d seen him at the beginning of the year. I fought the urge to take hold of his arm again, just to make certain he stayed solid.
The silence between us stretched out while I picked at my lumpy mashed potatoes, trying to figure out how to apologize. Julian didn’t touch his meal. The food might be scarcely edible, but he needed to eat. Before I could bring that up to get a conversation going, he spoke.
“What happened, Kim?” The question of the month. “I remember nothing. I look back in my memory and there’s a complete blank between listening to Robert sing at the party and waking up in the clinic. I’ve tried every way I know of to break through, but it’s as if there’s nothing there. And that scares the hell out of me.” His voice sounded tight, not scared, but I supposed for Julian that counted as terrified.
If he didn’t remember anything … then he didn’t remember what had happened to me, and what I’d said afterward. But lying to make myself look better would be an even bigger betrayal, so I took a deep breath to center myself and began right where his memories left off, relating the events of the last week and a half in as much detail as I knew them. The growing shock on Julian’s face had to be genuine; no one could fake that. He remembered nothing.
He laughed bitterly when I was done, though none of it seemed to be directed at me. “I seem to have been busy. Any idea what I was doing right after Samhain? I didn’t tell you anything?”
I shook my head mutely.
He curled his fingers into a tight fist. “Well, what do we know? I’m attacked; I disappear. I reappear, apparently in full possession of my faculties, at least as far as you could tell.” I nodded. “Then I leave you, talk to Robert at least once, and vanish again.”
“So we go talk to Robert,” I said.
~
Our quarry was on his way out of Kinfield when we arrived. Robert took one look at Julian’s expression and reversed direction.
I cast a sidelong glance at him as we climbed the stairs, but if he was still angry, he’d shelved it for now. We settled into their common room, and he listened as we told him what we had figured out so far.
“You said very little,” he told his roommate, leaning his chair precariously onto its back legs. “And answered precious few questions. Mostly you paced and swore at the walls.” That was unexpected; Julian didn’t go in for displays of temper. Displays of anything, really. “Then you went in there—” He nodded at Julian’s room. There were two off the common room, both big enough for a bed and a desk if you didn’t need to breathe. Robert’s desk was out here. “You shut the door behind you and stayed a while. When at last you emerged, you looked calmer. Then you said….” His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes to remember. “You said, ‘At least I’m not the only one imagining this.’ And you snorted, rather cynically. Then you seemed to see me, and said, ‘I’m going to see if her advice is any good.’ Then you left.”
I closed my eyes to think. After my failure, Julian had apparently decided to take matters into his own hands. Was that where things had gone wrong?
Then another thought came to me, and my attention snapped to Julian. “You said ‘her.’ Were you referring to me?”
Julian’s head came up in a swift arc. “Robert—did you hear me talking in there?”
“Impossible to say. I had music on.”
The three of us leapt to our feet. Julian reached his screen first. His long fingers flew, waking it and bringing up the call log for the past week.
“Ariana,” Robert said, just as Julian reached the name. Ariana, no last name given; a call had been made to her at 10:42 p.m. on November fifth. It was the most recent entry.
Julian hit redial. After two rings, the screen flickered, and brought up a woman’s face.
I realized then why there had been no last name. A telephone directory would list her under Fiain. There was no mistaking it, even though the skin-crawling effect of her presence couldn’t be transmitted by the screen. The inhuman tinge was still there, subtly, in the cast of her features, the lightning blue of her eyes.
“Julian!” she said in surprise, then hesitated. She must have seen Robert and me crowding in behind him.
“Ariana, I need to ask you some questions.”
“Whatever you need,” she said instantly. “Anything we can do to help.”
We? The rest of the wilders. I didn’t know for sure, but I would have bet on it. They were set apart from society; of course they would band together.
Julian closed his eyes. “What did I say to you last time?”
“What?”
He opened his eyes and sighed. “I remember nothing. Whatever I did, it must not have gone well. So I need to know what it was.”
She looked appalled. “Gods and sidhe. I told you to do it—”
“Do what?” Julian gripped the edge of the desk. “Start at the beginning.”
Ariana nodded sharply. After taking a moment to compose her thoughts, she began.
Julian had told her about the attack on the riverbank. I listened to her retelling with interest. He’d described it as an attempt to capture his mind, perhaps more, and credited my shield with giving him the respite he needed to fight back. From there, according to Ariana, he’d slept off a backlash-headache of monumental proportions, put up the strongest shields he could, and made several failed attempts to scan the area for any clues as to the origin and nature of the attack.
“You didn’t find anything. And none of your theories had any evidence to back them up. You didn’t much want to ask for help—” A wry note in her voice made me suppress a smile. Apparently not all wilders were as obsessively self-sufficient as Julian. “But you didn’t see any other choice. So you went to a friend.”
“Me,” I murmured. Ariana’s eyes flickered to me.
“You’re Kim?” When I nodded, she went on. “You were attacked as well.”
“Sort of,” I said, frowning as I thought over the details. “It sounds a lot like what Julian described from Samhain. Only it didn’t come close to succeeding, even though I’m not as strong as he is.” Maybe because it hadn’t been ready for me. The thought made my gut twist.
“What then?” Julian asked intently.
“You called me,” Ariana said. “I’d been hearing from half the Fiain already. You were the only one attacked, as far as we can tell, but everyone seems to have known something was in the wind.”
Julian’s expression was distant as he fought to reclaim the memory. “I told you it felt … directed. But strong enough that others would pick up on it.” He focused on Ariana once more. “What did you tell me to do?”
Ariana winced. “I told you to go somewhere safely apart from everyone else, lay down a circle with every binding known to man, and summon something for answers.”
Silence, except for the faint ticking of Robert’s antique clock. “Anything else?” Julian asked, in a dead voice that made me flinch.
“No,” Ariana said. “I promised to spread the word. Then you hung up.”
More silence. “That’s it, then,” Julian said at last. “I summoned something—but instead of answers, I got my memory wiped, all the way back to before the attack.” He sighed and lowered his head. “Looks like I ran into the enemy again.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, surprising even myself. My subconscious was one step ahead of the rest of me. “The thing that attacked you, and snared me when I went looking—it tried to munch us. We both agreed on that. If you summoned it, why would it stop with erasing your memory? You think it was sorry for what it tried to do?”
“Maybe the circle protected him,” Ariana said.
“No, I agree with Kim,” Robert said, shaking his head. “The whole tenor is off. And we’ve yet to explain the missing days. Julian left that night; even if he waited until the next day to cast the circle, why did he not show up again until the early morning of the tenth? What was he doing in that time?”
Julian answered him grimly. “That’s what we have to find out.”
~
Michele knelt and touched the ground with her fingertips. Robert, Julian, and I waited in a silent ring around her, me trying not to shiver in the biting air.
“Something … big….” Michele’s accented voice was distant and halting, the speech of someone in a trance. “People … more than one.” Another long pause, and then she surfaced with a sigh. “A healing prayer, I think. Hard to read it clearly, but it wasn’t a summoning.”
Julian didn’t swear, but he turned and slammed his palm with bruising force into a tree trunk. I put one hand out to stop him.
“Where else?” Robert asked.
“I don’t know.” The very deadness of Julian’s voice was worse than anger. Michele backed up a step. “Any of the other glades would have been too public. Even this one was a long shot. I wouldn’t have wanted to be interrupted.”
“Are you sure you would’ve used a glade?” I asked.
“I—” Julian said, but that was as far as he got. He stared at me, inspiration dawning. “No. Privacy would have been important, but more than that—gods. I’m an idiot.”
We ran to the river. Progress along its bank was slow, but I wasn’t certain where exactly we’d been Samhain night, so we didn’t dare back off to more open ground. I paused several times, eyeing a likely spot, trying to remember, moving on.
“There,” I said suddenly. “The broken branch.”
The limb in question sagged down to touch the riverbank; I remembered clinging to it. And all of us could feel the heavy residue of power in the air. I kicked myself for not thinking of this before; the laws of sympathetic magic made it the perfect place to try.
Michele was on the ground and tranced in moments. “Summoning,” she said distinctly.
“Can you tell what?” Julian waited, tight as a harp-string.
Her brow furrowed as she sorted her way through the traces. “No. Wards … interfere.”
Of course. The same protections designed to keep Julian safe from whatever he summoned would also block Michele from sensing the target’s nature. Then again, the wards hadn’t been enough. Shouldn’t she be able to feel something?
“Anything malevolent?” Julian asked.
Michele looked up. Her eyes had rolled back in her head until only the whites showed. She scanned the clearing, even though she could not possibly see like that.
“No,” she said slowly, the word dragged out of her. “I … don’t think so.”
No malevolence. And yet he’d disappeared for days, and reappeared with his memory wiped clean.
“Let’s go back,” Julian said. He sounded calm, but the very evenness of his tone made me doubt it. Or maybe it was just that I knew him too well. Biting my lip, I followed him out of the Arboretum.
~
“What other choice have you?” Robert demanded of Julian, frustration tingeing his voice. “You were alone. We have no other way to learn what happened.”
Julian didn’t answer. He’d come to dinner from a meeting with the Dean, and judging by the stiffness of his shoulders, it hadn’t gone well. She’d never liked having a wilder on campus, and this recent strangeness had only amplified that. I pitied him, having to explain his actions to her when he didn’t remember half of them and didn’t dare admit to the rest.
“Reason with him,” Robert appealed to me. His anger had vanished as if it had never been; I was an ally once more. “He will listen to you. The memories have to be there somewhere, and Liesel can find them.”
Liesel was opening her mouth, probably to disagree, when Julian interrupted.
“They’re not there,” he said flatly. I wouldn’t have wanted the look he was sending Robert directed at me. “I’d know if they were. It’s not a matter of me or someone else having blocked them out; I could find that, and work through it. They’re gone. And no amount of prying into my head will find them.”
He had to be telling the truth. If it were merely his fierce antipathy to letting others into his mind, he would say so. “I believe him, Robert,” I said. “Let it be.” Robert shot me a frustrated glance, which I ignored. There was no point antagonizing Julian. He’d been through too much already.
Conversation around the table died. We sat in uncomfortable silence, surrounded by noise, no one meeting anyone else’s eyes. Liesel picked at her food, but ate hardly anything. Stress always killed her appetite.
My mind continued to gnaw at our problems. If Julian didn’t have information, who did? The obvious answer was, no one. But I refused to accept that. Someone, somewhere, had to know something. We just had to figure out who to ask.
Questions. Answers. This was a familiar path we were treading. And with that, an idea began to form in my mind.
~
“This has got to be the craziest idea we’ve ever had,” Liesel said as we picked our way through the shadows along the bank of the river.
Robert stubbed his toe and swore. “The idea is not bad. Our common sense in trying it on our own—now that is questionable.”
“Who else would take our places?” I asked, hitching my backpack higher on my shoulder.
“Somebody trained?” Liesel suggested.
“What, like Bradley? Madison? Fitzgerald? They all tried, and failed.”
“That was divination. This is different. Gods, Grayson would be perfect.”
“I should be doing it alone.” Julian’s voice sounded unearthly, coming out of the darkness ahead. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“When pigs fly,” I said.
Robert’s answer came on the heels of mine. “You tried it alone before, and look how well you fared.”
“He’s right,” Liesel agreed. “You were even more crazy to try this alone.”
“We’re here,” I said, forestalling further argument.
The river ran black, with no moon to light its surface. This spot was starting to become familiar, in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. I set down my burden and stretched to relieve a stiff back. Gods, I hoped this worked. All of it, but my own part in particular. One successful shield did not a sorceress make. Could I hold up even my small end of the burden?
Don’t think about it. Just do it. You owe it to Julian.
Flashlights and an electric lantern drove back the shadows enough for us to function. From the backpacks came candles, two books, a compass, matches, incense, four thin bundles of silk, rope, several fist-sized semi-precious stones, measuring tape, torches, and more. Everything a good and well-balanced ritual might need.
Julian and Robert outlined concentric circles on the ground, sketching them into the dirt with sticks. When the largest was in place, Liesel and I planted the standing torches at the cardinal points along its rim. The candles we set at the inner circle. Then, while the guys began the painstaking process of marking the circles with symbols, she and I inspected everyone’s shielding. We would boost it during the ritual, but before that, the everyday shields should be in shape.
They were still checking their work when we finished our part. Robert was going over the outer ring, a circle of containment that would keep our energies from bleeding into the outside world, and outside influences from coming in. The inner circle, the active one, he left to Julian, the only one of us who actually knew how to work a summoning.
I looked at Julian, on his hands and knees as he scrutinized the symbols. We’d brought the books for him, but he hadn’t touched them. I hoped he knew what he was doing.
Something seemed off-kilter, though.
I glanced around the area, taking in the circles, our bags, the electric lantern—
“Julian,” I said suddenly, “where’s your stuff?”
Everyone stopped. They looked at each other, and at me. “What do you mean?” Liesel asked.
I gestured at the things strewing the area, the ritual circles carved into the earth. “All this. All the signs that a ritual happened here, everything necessary for it. Michele read the magical residue—but what happened to the physical evidence?”
Julian, sitting back on his heels, gazed at me steadily. “Someone cleaned it up.”
“Who?” Liesel breathed.
“Had it been university personnel, you’d have heard,” Robert pointed out.
“Maybe whoever you summoned,” I said, still looking at Julian.
“Lord and Lady,” Liesel whispered. “If it—kidnapped you, and destroyed the evidence—”
Julian rose smoothly and walked past me to the pile of tools. Bending, he picked up one of the silk-wrapped items and stripped its cover away, revealing a slender, black-hilted knife.
There was a pause. Then Robert snorted. “Kind of them, to put your athame back in your room.”
I stared at the blade. “If that was back where it belonged … you must have put it there.”
“And unless it took over your body like a puppet—”
Julian finished Robert’s thought for him. “I must have gone freely.”
None of us had a response to that. Julian finally moved, crossing to stand in the west, between the outer protective circle and the inner one.
“Are you—”
“It’s ready,” Julian said.
Liesel blinked, cut off halfway through her question. “You’re sure?”
“It’s ready,” he repeated.
A flaw in either of the circles, but most particularly the one for summoning, would put us all in a great deal of danger. And Julian had still been checking when I interrupted him. Liesel looked none too convinced. But I shrugged and took up my post in the east, opposite Julian. Robert stood in the south. Liesel glanced back and forth between the two of us, then sighed and stationed herself in the north. “All right. But if you’re wrong….” She left the sentence unfinished. If Julian was wrong, she’d have bigger things to do than yell at him.
We cast the protective outer circle with attention to detail. I’d done this dozens of times last term, in class and in the Palladian Circle, but never very well. Earth, Water, Air, Fire: we summoned them from most solid to least. I drew power easily enough, but fumbled the pass to Liesel. She caught it, and then Robert came in and steadied us both. When Julian took up the power and cast the circle, I could see the steady glow of the shield without any effort. For ordinary rituals, it was a negligible thing. Then again, for ordinary rituals, its only purpose was protect the demarcated ground of the circle from any outside contamination. This shield was to that sort what a bomb shelter was to a raincoat.
With the outer circle finished, Julian took the lead. We followed his direction, raising another shield on the inner circle, this one to keep whatever we summoned away from us. I did better this time, but thanked the gods my only job from here on out was to provide power. That, I was pretty sure I could do.
I wondered about Julian, though. He’d taken a class on summoning—sophomore year, long before most CM majors were allowed to—but no newly-taught student would be this effortless at something so complex. So clearly he’d known how to do it before he even came to the university.
Which explained why they let him into the class. But Julian had told me on Samhain night there were things he could learn better here, at Welton. If summoning wasn’t it, then what? Shielding? But why?
No time to consider it further. I was grounded and centered as firmly as I’d ever been, as were the others, and now both the summoning circle and its containment shield were tied in. Anything trying to get out would have to go through all four of us.
That wasn’t a reassuring thought.
The symbols on the summoning circle began to radiate their own light. I didn’t have a prayer of identifying the technique Julian was using, of course, and I couldn’t understand his chant, either; it was in Irish, his chosen ritual language. I could only trust him.
On Julian’s cue, the rest of us fed power to him. His chanting grew louder, and despite the cold, a sheen of sweat appeared on his face. I prayed to whomever might be listening that this wouldn’t be beyond him.
“Cuirim toghairm ort,” Julian said in a clear voice.
A sudden swirl of light focused all my scattered thoughts.
A glowing mist had spun into being in the center of the circle. It whirled more quickly, slowed down, sped up again, as if uncertain—then it flashed to a vibrant emerald green. But I was no longer watching. My eyes were on Julian instead. His brow was furrowed, more puzzled than worried. He stared at the mist as though this were somehow echoing the memories he’d lost—or someone had taken from him.
The mist slowed again, and something was taking shape inside.
Then an explosion sent us all staggering.
The blow that knocked us back wasn’t physical. It was a strike of pure psychic force, pounding my mind until my eyes blurred. I stumbled, caught myself with one hand, and looked back up at the circle.
What had been a gently glowing mist was now a vortex of golden light. It surged and battered at the barrier that held it trapped, seeking a weak point. With a panicked cry, I jumped forward. The attack had staggered me, but now I dug my heels in and pitted my strength against the maelstrom we’d summoned. To either side of me, Liesel and Robert did the same.
And through the fiery golden hell between us, I saw Julian.
His mouth was open in a silent scream. The tendons in his neck stood out, as though he were fighting some incredible pull. The light lashed out at him more frequently now, ignoring the rest of us, and every time it did, Julian flinched.
“Shield him!” I screamed through the thunder of the vortex. It was a risk. The light might shift and break through at a different point if we sent our power to aid Julian. But I was deathly certain that its goal was not to escape: it wanted my friend.
Was this what happened last time?
“Not again,” I snarled through my teeth.
He needed power to fight back. Liesel and Robert fed it to me instead of him. I caught it as if I’d been doing this since childhood, focused it, then sent it winging to protect Julian.
And then, as before, he took it out of my hands. Instead of me feeding him power, Julian was now pulling it out of me, and through me, Liesel and Robert. Dangerous, but I trusted him; I opened the gates and let him take it all.
For one timeless, perfectly balanced moment, we held our own. But the golden light grew steadily more intense, gaining in power and fury, while our circle of four grew weak.
Liesel collapsed. I saw it in my peripheral vision; my attention was riveted across the circle, half-blinded by the vortex, locked on Julian’s face. A growl from my left was Robert, hanging on only through sheer goddamned fury. The power he drew from the air blended with his own, streaming into me, merging with the energy I pulled and then flying to Julian, in a never-ending and doomed attempt to hold him.
We weren’t enough.
The light flared. Robert crumpled. I heard a cry from my own lips, overlaid by an inhuman scream, and then everything disappeared in a blaze of golden light.