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So she let hot water spatter against her and began the process that would ensure a successful trip into the mist. She thrust away the notion that Rothly was trapped. The Lightfolk could be wrong. Thinking of Rothly snared, that she might be stuck trying to save him, could lead to panic.
As a human and elf, she liked the water, her djinn part not so much. So she let the human enjoy the liquid slipping against her skin, and hummed. Then she let the elf part twirl in the shower, and sang. Then she stepped from the tub and let her djinn heritage flash her dry.
She put on a raw silk orange robe and stepped in a particular rhythm to her bedroom, closed the door. She walked around a large tapestry bag that Hartha had brought from the basement.
Jenni reached for the mug on her bedside table, saw her hand trembled. Chinook, who’d been snoozing on the bed, strolled over and rubbed against Jenni. Sucking in a deep breath, Jenni picked up the heavy cat. Chinook purred. The cat loved elemental energy.
Holding Chinook, Jenni rocked back and forth, comforting them both. “It’s just been you and me, but you know I have a brother, Rothly.” She’d cried enough tears while calling out for all her lost family.
Chinook just purred.
“I’m going into the gray mist, the interdimension. I haven’t done that for many years. But I have to go now. I think I’m the only one alive who can survive the interdimension. Because I can balance the energies. The greatest magical Folk—Light and Dark—are usually only one element…and I’m babbling. Dammit, Rothly shouldn’t have tried. He had enough Mistweaver talent to get in, but not out!”
Chinook swept a quick tongue under Jenni’s chin and she dragged in a breath. “I’ll have to be careful, not move a step in there lest I lose my way. Not stay too long or I’ll be trapped like the Lightfolk say Rothly is.” She let a nervous heat wave shudder through her. Chinook butted her head against Jenni’s arm, stroking them both.
“Yes, I know you like magical energies, especially balanced.” Jenni set Chinook back down on the bed.
“Since I haven’t done this for so long, you can be my anchor, so I don’t lose my bearings, unable to exit.” Another deep breath at the thought. With the lightest of touches, she connected to the cat’s energy, linked them, let some of hers cycle to Chinook. The cat’s purr revved.
“I won’t be gone long.” She hoped. “Just need to find out if I can sense him. I should, even if he’s at home—I mean in Northumberland. This is home now. Ready?”
Chinook sat on the bed, tail curled around her paws. Jenni snagged her mug from the bedside table, then turned to face south and began her energy cycling. She must match her own energies to the vibration of the interdimension. She drank the tea and let the magical essence of it flicker through her like tiny flames, igniting her nerves so she’d be prepared to enter the gray mist. Make sure the timing was right, longer than if she’d been practicing often. Cool her energy for two minutes. Warm for six. Then hot!
She set the empty mug aside, walked beyond the end of her bed and into the middle of the room, faced south once more. She checked that she was completely balanced magically, saw the gray mist rise before her and chanted an entrance to the interdimension open. Taking one step forward on the carpet, she also moved a half step away from the dimension of Earth and into the gray mist that was the space between the reality of Earth and other planets, other places, other Earths.
She didn’t have the talent to open a temporary portal or establish a gateway to another dimension, but she knew that there were other worlds just beyond the mist.
It was quiet here, and it felt like she stood on solid ground, but if she looked down, she wouldn’t be able to see her feet. She could see nothing but flashes and sheets and twists of the elemental, magical energies, bright against the sky like the northern lights, the aurora borealis.
The real geographical landscape had faded, the house, the mountains in the west, the skyscrapers downtown. Slowly she turned in a full circle, checking the immediate area around her. All magic was balanced, the land around her imbued with equal amounts of fire and air and earth and water. Because she, an elemental balancer, had lived here in Mystic Circle for fourteen years. Her innate power did that. Slight tendrils of the equally mixed energy steamed upward.
Narrowing her eyes, she stared toward the south and the small business district that held the coffee house, the Sensitive New Age Bean. Since it was close to her influence, the elements were more equal than those in other directions. Yet there were still more flares of earth and fire.
Farther south the blue-green of water elemental energy swirled in a pool, spiraling from the “ground” that Jenni couldn’t see, tingeing the mist with color. That denoted Sloan’s Lake several miles away. One of the reasons she’d chosen this neighborhood was to be near Sloan’s and several other minor lakes. Water in Denver was at a premium and having lakes relatively close made it easier for her to call that element.
There was a slow, slight echo of a mew and she knew Chinook was near her feet in the real world. Dear Chinook, the being closest to her in the last few years, her remaining cat. The cat who liked magical energy best.
A tingle on Jenni’s skin prompted her to turn east and she faced that way, saw huge streams of magical elemental energy near downtown. They looked as if they were directed, not the random flares of naturally occurring magic. Not balanced, though. The blue-violet of air predominated. This was Lightfolk crafting.
Her eyes widened. She’d never seen anything like that in her seventy-five years. That phenomenon hadn’t been there when she’d moved to Denver.
So this Eight Corp that the Lightfolk ran was not a small deal. Not if it was messing with the magical energies like that.
She’d allowed them to sneak up on her, hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t known they’d established a base in Denver. Why Denver? She shivered. Chinook mewed again and Jenni tore her gaze from downtown.
She was here to find her brother. She swallowed hard.
The Lightfolk believed Rothly was lost in the gray mist of the interdimension.
How long? A person died after a period of time…Jenni wasn’t sure of the length. But she wasn’t the scholar of the family. Another reason to return to Northumberland, for information.
Since she’d never spent more than forty-five minutes in the mist, the time it took to die had seemed long to her as a youngster. Now she thought it was under three months. How long had Rothly been gone? She’d been too angry, too frightened for her brother, to ask the right questions.
Maybe she could sense him. She wouldn’t be able to see him, or move in the mist without becoming lost, but she might know.
She hoped. A lot of hoping and praying going on. As usual when involved with the great Lightfolk.
She wanted to save him more than anything else in her life.
He’d be the only other person in the mist.
She sent her energy probing through the interdimension, searching, searching. There! Somewhere, north? Northwest? Geographically she couldn’t tell…but there was a pulsing human-and-Lightfolk-elf-djinn aura… Rothly.
If she stilled enough, breathed shallowly, she could feel the faintest touch of his fractured energy against her skin.
She closed her eyes, and visualized an image from the sensations she felt. His aura was damaged—his magic didn’t envelop him evenly. It was ragged, uneven, with a couple of splintered spots.
A sound broke from her, a keening in this silent place. She couldn’t tell how far it echoed, how long.
His aura pulsed slowly, too slowly, like he was dying. Trapped in the interdimension without the magic to save himself.
How could she find him and retrieve him? Love poured from her toward him and she thought his aura throbbed slightly stronger. How aware was he? She waited but he said nothing, not mind-to-mind, not aloud.
“Rothly!” she screamed. Still nothing, not even a flinch. She thought he’d have moved, yelled, cursed if he were conscious.
She didn’t know enough about this deadly dimension, would have to research family records to save him. But she’d have to be where he was to haul him out.
Shivers ran through her. She couldn’t bear this. Bad enough that only one of her family had survived the battle. Horrible that he’d been maimed. Worst of all that he’d condemned her as she had blamed herself, bitterly lashed out and cut her guilt deep.
She couldn’t lose him. Not the very last of her family. She must save him.
Then she sensed something else around him. A flickering, fluttering blip. How could that be?
Jenni’s breath stopped as the thing, some other magical being—a shadleech?—swarmed around Rothly, blocking his aura, hung on him batlike. It was here in the interdimension. It—perhaps more than one initially—had trapped him as much as his own crippled power. The shadleech sucked away his magical energy.
Worry gnawed on her like the shadleech on Rothly. She must find out exactly when he’d entered the mist, started so ill-fated a mission. Find him!
She lifted her foot. Another mew and a tug from Chinook, Jenni’s tiny anchor, reminding her that she didn’t dare step away from the place she’d entered.
Time to leave the interdimension, search and find where Rothly had entered the gray mist. Haul him out.
Hope she could save him and not die herself.
CHAPTER 4
JENNI DREW IN A BREATH, STICKY WITH THE strange misty atmosphere of the interdimension, said the spell to leave. Her limbs trembled and her legs gave out and she stumbled until she fell onto the soft bed. She shook not only from the exertion, but also from fear for Rothly.
Fear for herself, too. She couldn’t save Rothly herself, needed to have the help of the Lightfolk to battle the shadleeches. The last time she’d trusted the Lightfolk her whole family had died.
Chinook hopped onto the bed and settled onto her stomach and it was even harder to breathe.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in, Hartha.” Holding Chinook, Jenni panted as she scooted up against the headboard.
The brownie woman set a laptop tray of thick and hearty stew before her. There was more herbal tea, the stuff to build up her energy.
“You weren’t gone long,” Hartha said, some curiosity in her voice. “Less than a quarter hour.”
“Long enough,” Jenni said. There was fresh bread and not from the local deli. Hartha had baked it the night before. Fresh sweet cream butter that didn’t come from the cheese shop. More and more the magical way of doing things was overtaking the human customs Jenni’d lived by for so long.
“We have thought how to repay you for all your kindnesses. We know you want a sunroom and will add one to the house when you are gone,” Hartha said.
Jenni stared, thought of all the permits, shrugged. The sunroom might very well go up overnight. When they noticed, none of her neighbors would say anything to the authorities. People with magic gravitated to Mystic Circle. Not that she’d ever spoken openly about magic or magical heritages with her neighbors. “Sure.” She cleared her throat, did a half bow. “Thank you.”
It took Jenni the rest of the morning to arrange for time off and the journey—first to save Rothly, then to complete the mission for the Lightfolk.
She told the game developers she worked for that she was going on a research trip for the next big expansion issue that they were designing and that would go live in the autumn. She also suggested the idea of including flying horses as optional mounts for players. That made the devs dither enough about the work it would take that they’d be glad she was gone.
The brownies and she discussed her mission and she drew up documents, then she inspected the house from attic to basement. The squirrel holes in the attic were gone, the eaves repaired. In the basement she found that her half crawl space was no longer “half.” There was a new and suspicious-looking polished wood door set in the wall fronting the cul-de-sac.
Jenni decided not to dress in a professional suit; instead she tried an arty look for her appointment with the Lightfolk, feeling more comfortable. Feeling like she might be able to hold her own.
She finally finished the espresso from the coffee shop just before she hopped the bus to downtown. She could transport herself magically with great effort, but she sure wouldn’t be able to handle a meeting with manipulative Lightfolk afterward and she wanted all her wits as keen as an elven blade.
As the bus wove the five miles into downtown Denver, the sky darkened from the crystalline blue of bitter cold to thick clouds of bruised gray. Humidity spread through the air with the taste of snow and Jenni shivered. Wet cold sank into her like nothing else.
She disembarked with many others in LoDo, lower downtown, at the stop for the free Sixteenth Street mall shuttle toward the business district and the Capitol.
“Got any change, lady?” Coins rattled in a paper cup. Jenni glanced at the guy, her hand dipping into her red trench-coat pocket, pulling out change. She swallowed hard. He was…grotesque, with disproportional head and limbs, growths on his face and hands, a yellowish bad-kidney tinge to his skin. The scent of stale bubblegum rose from him.
She shouldn’t stare, but couldn’t help herself. He grinned a broken-and-missing-toothed smile and Jenni’s fingers opened, dropping coins. He caught them deftly with his cup. People streamed around her.
Jindesfarne. It was less the audible sound of her name than a feeling, not quite a mental touch on her mind. Not from the homeless man before her.
She looked across the street and saw a…tall, broad-shouldered being of gray shadows watching her. Magic surrounded him so she knew no one else noticed him.
A hood obscured his features, though she thought they were fine—as fine as the most beautiful Lightfolk. Frissons slithered down her spine and she knew she wasn’t looking at an elf, but a great one of the Darkfolk. Her throat tightened. She would not answer.
You should reconsider this mission for the Lightfolk. Now that he spoke more than a word, Jenni heard rich undertones in the gorgeous voice, seduction. She was glad she couldn’t see his eyes, a gaze that would snag and seduce her into anything.
She couldn’t reconsider. She had to save her brother. No Darkfolk would understand that. They cared for nothing more than their personal plans, one and all. But her inner alarms were sounding. Don’t contradict him. Maybe, Jenni mentally projected.
The figure laughed, showing white wicked teeth. You lie.
To her horror he broke apart before her eyes, into tiny flittering beings that had comprised him. Shadleeches! Most winged away, but one came and fastened on her wrist, claws piercing her skin, hurting! Sucking her magic from her. She flung it off, stopping a cry by clamping her hand over her mouth. Her heart thumped so hard it was all she could hear. People walked by her faster.
The man had not been real, but a construct. How? Clawlike fingers clamped around her ankle. The beggar. He was the real Dark one. He’d created the other, distracted her.
She looked down into wet orbs of eyes, wrenched her gaze away. Shudders ran through her.
My shadleeches are pretty things, the great Dark one said, in that beautiful voice. His fingers tightened, grinding into her flesh and against her bone.
Fear flared and she used it, used her magic to flash heat to her ankle, burn, burn, burn!
The “beggar’s” shriek was beyond regular hearing. She was free! She stumbled, limped, saw the bronze doors of a nearby bank and rushed to them. She barreled through the doors and as they slowly shut, a glimpse revealed the Dark one’s ungainly body cloaked in an “invisible-to-mortals” illusion hanging in midair. His bulbous stomach drooped, his eyes blazed red. “Mistweaver blood is like the finest wine.” A long tongue swept his slashlike mouth. He vanished.
Inwardly quivering, she sank onto a marble bench in the bank’s atrium. His words drummed in her ears. He’d hurt her family, perhaps killed them, and he was back.
Since people were staring at her here, too, she sat stiffly, regulating her breathing from ragged panting. She studied the marks on her wrist from the shadleech. The beggar-Dark-one referred to his shadleeches. Were they all his, or only that bunch? She thought the latter. And the more she thought of him, the more power she gave him. Fear coated her mouth.
She still had the Lightfolk to deal with, had to decide how much to tell them—about a lot of things. She couldn’t afford fear. Sending adrenaline energy and a touch of fire magic to her wrist and her ankle, she let the marks fade away, scanned her body for any dark poison and found nothing except a small weakness in her magic.
It had not been a strong attack. Too many mortals around for that—since she sensed he’d wanted to gut her and feast on her blood and magic. His voice had lost the illusion of beauty, too, crackling and breaking and screeching. He might have been beautiful in all ways once, but evil magic worked on a being.
But he was a great Dark one and she was a halfling. Nothing could change that. She would need the Lightfolk to fight him. So much for the vague idea of saving her brother and refusing to consider the rest of the mission, though breaking her word could kill her and her brother just as dead.
She was truly trapped, and she’d better think smart.
Her pocket computer chimed. Half an hour before her appointment…she’d left very early. She could spare a few minutes to gather herself, sink into a little meditative trance. She had to push the attack aside or the Lightfolk would easily manipulate her at their meeting—she’d have no control over the quest to save Rothly.
So she centered herself and breathed and felt magic surrounding her. Significantly more magic in down-town Denver than there had been six months ago. Good, concentrate on that.
She left the bank and walked, stretched all her senses, let loose the extra one that gauged magic, tasted it, and knew magic rippled like minor waves from a central point.
All the stray molecules in the atmosphere of magic were being pulled to one source, then emanated from it, like a recycling pump…her nose and tongue and skin and scalp told her that the new magic emanating from that point was just a little richer than it had been.
Walking close to a concrete wall, she trailed her fingers. As she’d suspected, the building was soaking up magic. It was penetrating into the electrical system. Fascinating.
After skirting a winter-dry fountain, she crossed to the doors of one of the tallest buildings in Denver, hesitated as she put her hand on the door pull, which sparked energy against her palm. She suppressed fear that sparked with the magic—fear for her brother, for facing great Lightfolk who assigned missions that only caused her hideous loss.
But she had to save her brother and the Lightfolk had information and the quest was the price.
With one last deep breath, she entered the building and approached the security desk. There she showed her human ID that stated her birth date was fifty years later than it had been. She would be twenty-five for a while yet.
As the guard scanned her ID against the computer’s appointment list, Jenni studied the directory. Eight Corp was the only business on the thirty-second floor. The guard murmured “Good afternoon,” and indicated the correct elevator, not that she could have missed the bay. The magic was much stronger there.
During the elevator ride, she breathed in a calming rhythm, checked that her natural fire was banked. Losing control in these negotiations would be disastrous.
The door opened and Jenni stepped out onto moss. To humans it might look like a dark green sculpted rug, but it was true moss. Her toes wiggled in her shoes.
She faced a gray-blue marble wall that framed a large granite desk with a top-of-the-line computer system. Fountains bubbled somewhere near.
The female dwarf receptionist—dwarves traditionally guarded entrances—didn’t stand when Jenni swished in, the layers of her filmy, multicolored skirt rustling. But the receptionist gave her outfit a glance and frowned at the bright gold blouse Jenni wore, easily seen since her red leather trench coat was open.
The dwarfem’s wide nostrils flared, “Djinn and elf,” she stated, then, “half-breed human.”
Dwarves responded well to rudeness. Jenni showed her pointy incisors. She could be ill-mannered, too. She scanned the female with all her senses. “Full dwarf, ancient fem.” She didn’t meet the receptionist’s gaze. “And I am an elemental balancer.” A quality that no one else now in this world could claim. “Why would anyone choose a dwarf as a greeter?” She let the question hang. “Surely one of elven blood would be much better.” But pure elves wouldn’t see the job of greeting others as important.
The receptionist grunted, a sound like pebbles rolling down a rocky slope, then said, “My apologies, Jindesfarne Mistweaver.”
A full-blooded dwarfem apologizing to her. Things certainly had changed. Jenni curled her tongue to the bottom of her mouth, letting the taste of magic coat it. The best, finest kind of magic, all four elements in nearly equal measure.
Then the atmosphere changed and the tang on her tongue turned to honey. More elves had entered the suite. Odd to even think of elves in a modern office building…any of the Lightfolk.
“Djinnfem?” The receptionist was prompting a reply to her apology.
Jenni didn’t know the dwarfem’s name and the scrolled-and-engraved brass nameplate on the granite stated Mrs. Daurfin. Jenni snorted. No Lightfolk would ever put a real name out for anyone to see. Jenni narrowed her eyes but did the proper thing, naming the dwarfem’s heritage as she did so. “Apology accepted, Dwarfem of the Diamond clan.”
The receptionist narrowed her eyes, too. They became glinting slits of black between brownish curves of flesh. “Mistweaver, Desertshimmer, Cirruswisp,” she rumbled again, defining Jenni’s ancestry.
“I’m Jenni Weavers in the human world.”
“Please wait,” the dwarfem instructed, and gestured with a stubby hand to two semicircular groupings of furniture in the space between the elevator and the desk. Both were black and cushiony, one side was leather, the other looked like leather but was actually made from the hide of naugas.
Jenni was not early enough to sit down. They were making her wait. Her inner fire simmered. She heard the tiny clicks of multikeystrokes from a nearby room and tasted another wave of magic. With a smile, she headed for a corridor off the lobby. She found what appeared to be a smooth wall with a bespelled door behind the illusion. Jenni waved and the spell vanished.
“You can’t go in there,” snapped the dwarfem.
Jenni shrugged a shoulder, opened the door to ripe swearing of the minor Waterfolk kind. The room was long and narrow, painted a stark white that none of the eight Lightfolk and Treefolk workers would appreciate. There was a long counter holding eight computers, a mixture of desktops, laptops, tablets and pockets, according to the size of the beings.
Just in front of her was a naiader—a minor Waterfolk male—who was slender with a bluish tinge to his skin and natural spiky green hair. He stood next to a chair, shoulders hunched as he typed. A mug of hot chocolate made with real cocoa steamed on the desk as if he’d just gotten it.
Programming lines rolled across his screen.
Jenni stepped near him to look at the code on his monitor without him being aware, as he was so caught up in his own irritation. Orange symbols, magical symbols, lit the screen along with regular white human programming lines and mathematical formulas. She nearly choked on her tongue.
Magic.
And technology.
These Folk were writing spells on the computer to draw magic into…into what?