Gemstones, Elves, and Other Insidious Magic (Dowser 9) Read online

  Many hands grabbed for me, trying to contain me, to hold me.

  I broke a few arms without even trying. The elves who had stepped forward scurried back, nursing their wounds.

  The ever-present, simmering hurricane — my liege’s power — stormed through my mind.

  I ignored it.

  I ignored my lady’s command to heel.

  Ignoring her was becoming easier each time.

  To my right, the ward builder had regained her feet, crossing to join the others loosely encircling me. Me and the unconscious dragon. Traveler had manifested a crystalline knife. But I didn’t care.

  I cared about the dragon. The dragon whose skin was almost the same color as mine. Neither he nor I were finely scaled. Neither he nor I had hair so pale it was almost white … or slightly pointed ears … or sharp teeth.

  I found myself wondering suddenly — if the dragon bled, would he bleed red? Red like me? Not the pale green of the elves?

  Because I wasn’t an elf.

  That much I remembered.

  That much I knew.

  A warrior elf got in my face while I was trying to look at the dragon. Trying to understand what I was feeling, to retrieve knowledge that felt just out of my reach. I took the elf’s knife, embedding it deeply within his blood armor before he’d even noticed its theft.

  Just for bothering me.

  He fell.

  Another elf darted forward, dragging the wounded elf away.

  The others waited, tightening the circle around me.

  The hurricane increased. A tornado slipped through the wound in my forehead, gaining entry through the gemstone embedded into my brain. It threatened the thoughts I was trying to collect. The clues I was trying to connect.

  Friend. Traveler had used that word.

  Friend.

  I knelt by the dragon, placing my hand on his chest. It rose steadily underneath my touch. His magic was dim when it should have been bright. Bright … and golden … and tasting like …

  “Not just my friend,” I whispered. “Mine … mine.”

  Two swords scissored around my neck, then forced me to my feet and away from the dragon. Traveler had appeared behind me without warning, closing the space between us before I could react. Teleporting. I should have followed up on my earlier promise and killed him.

  “I’m taking her head!”

  “No,” my liege shouted. “I have her under control.”

  “And each time that control slips, she kills one of us!”

  “When we conquer this world, those sacrifices will bring glory to us all.”

  Sacrifices … I remembered a yellow jacket abandoned in the rain …

  Sacrifices.

  I glanced at the newcomer. The ward builder, who had tried to strangle me. She was watching my liege, rubbing her chest. Then she glanced at me, dropping her hand to her side.

  “You look like … Mira,” I said, speaking to her. “And her brother. Same … nose …” I trailed off, losing track of the thought, of the connection.

  “Mira?” The ward builder furrowed her brow.

  My liege lunged forward, pressing her fingers to the gemstone in my forehead. A searing agony slammed through my brain.

  “Who is Mira?” the ward builder asked.

  I lost control of my limbs, collapsing forward against Traveler’s twin blades. They sliced into my neck, but my lady snarled a command — backed by a push of her power — and Traveler withdrew his twin crystal swords, allowing me to fall forward across the dragon.

  “Mira and her brother,” I murmured, trying to speak through the hurricane still rampaging through my mind. Trying to formulate the thought out loud. “My elf … friend … Mira. Illusionist … who wanted to die on her favorite black-sand beach …”

  “Sleep, alchemist,” my liege said. “You will retire to your room and sleep.”

  Blackness encroached on my vision, first taking my sight, then dampening all my other senses.

  I slept.

  As commanded.

  I woke while being dragged by either arm down a short hallway leading to one of the exits of the inner maze. Mentally clawing my way through the magic dampening my thoughts and restricting my movement, I managed to look up. The stairs to the second level were just ahead.

  Then I took serious exception to being dragged.

  I tucked my knees to my chest. And before my guards could do anything more than tighten their grip on my arms, I kicked out to the sides with both legs, taking their feet out from under them.

  They kept hold of me as they stumbled toward me, but I slammed my feet to the ground, straightening and twisting my arms until I could grab both their heads. Then I smashed their skulls together.

  Both of them fell before me in a tangle of limbs. Alive. But with cracked gemstones in their foreheads. I stepped over them, continuing toward the stairs with the understanding that I was to return to my room on the level above.

  Understanding that I was being compelled to return to my room? To sleep?

  I spotted a turtle.

  Yep. A turtle. In the hall.

  It was a mottled dark green, about six inches across, with red slashes on both sides of its head. It shimmied around the corner at the base of the stairs, as if it had been waiting just beyond the open doorway there. But that doorway led only to restroom facilities, as I had discovered when I first needed to use them. If there was an exterior exit in that direction, it had been walled off.

  Was the turtle waiting for me?

  I glanced back at my guards. They were still unconscious, sprawled in the center of the white-walled hall.

  Pushing away the compulsion that was urging me to continue up the stairs, I hunkered down in front of the turtle. It looked up at me with dead eyes.

  I flinched.

  A dead turtle?

  The creature shuffled closer to the stairs, pausing at the base, then looking back at me.

  A tiny black box was attached to its back.

  A camera?

  Some emotion twisted through me … fear? No. Anticipation. A smile spread across my face. Unaccustomed to that feeling, I touched my cheeks, touched my lips.

  The turtle shuffled slightly to the right, then to the left. As if it wanted to climb the stairs, but couldn’t.

  A bone-splintering pain — the pain of denying my liege’s compulsion — started edging the gemstone in my forehead. Before the ache could grow, could cloud my thoughts, I scooped the turtle up and jogged up the stairs.

  On the second level of the stadium, the smooth concrete floors of the lower level gave way to tightly woven beige carpet running down a long hallway. Empty offices branched off on either side.

  Hearing my guards begin to stir behind and below me, I tucked the turtle behind the door in the first office. As I placed it on the ground, I felt a tingle of familiar magic. The turtle was wearing a charm made out of a dime around its neck.

  The magic felt like … like I should have been able to taste it …

  “It’s dangerous,” I whispered to the turtle, “for you to be wandering around here …”

  Wait …

  I could do something about that, even drained after working on the gateway device for hours.

  I brushed my forefinger across the charmed dime, stirring the magic already stored within it. That magic felt dim, as if it too was drained. As if the spell was running out. That wasn’t good either.

  I snagged the tiniest trickle of power in the charm — carefully, so as to not accidentally steal it for myself. Then I cemented it with my own magic, informing it that it was to hide the tiny turtle from the sight of its enemies. Not an invisibility spell, exactly. That was beyond my abilities. But an obscuring … a whisper to look away, to look elsewhere.

  That would allow the turtle to continue its quest.

  But why I felt the need to do anything for the little dead creature, I didn’t know.

  I heard the elves clambering up the stairs. I quickly exited into the hall and hea
ded to an office halfway along on the left. Crossing through the open door into the room that was mine quieted the compulsion that had forced me to continue moving.

  Though I’d also been commanded to sleep, I ignored the neatly made cot against the far wall, walking instead to the room’s tiny barred window. The light over the city had changed since I’d last looked out. It was darker now. My liege preferred to work through the daylight hours. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes sped steadily by the stadium, snaking out through the downtown streets and carrying busy people through their busy lives.

  I wasn’t certain what I was looking for, peering out through the crystalline bars and the magic that coated the window. But I always looked for it just the same.

  There was something about the turtle … some connection I was missing …

  Magic shifted behind me. In the doorway. I glanced back to see one of my guards snarling at me as he grabbed and slammed the door shut. Locks clicked into place, followed by the magic that sealed the room from … from what?

  From me.

  I was a prisoner.

  There were moments when I thought I might belong. Like I was meant to be with the elves, repairing the gateway. But then …

  I wrapped my hands around the window’s crystal bars. The magic embedded in them — magic meant to cage me — seared my palms and fingers. But not as badly as each successive time before.

  I was becoming immune. Slowly and steadily, I was claiming the elven magic for myself.

  Again I scanned the busy streets crisscrossing the city. I saw cars, trucks, buses … stores, apartments, restaurants. Some sort of temporary orange plastic fencing had been erected around the stadium a few days earlier.

  But I wasn’t looking for any of that.

  I was looking for the girl. The young woman.

  The turtle belonged to the woman in the red poncho.

  That knowledge filled me with an absolute certainty.

  I didn’t know what the woman in the poncho was doing. Or why the turtle had shown itself to me, asking for help up the stairs.

  But I knew one thing.

  I knew I wasn’t an elf.

  A fierceness flooded through me. I tightened my grip on the bars.

  They had captured me.

  Imprisoned me.

  Compelled me.

  I didn’t know who I was.

  But I wasn’t a pet.

  I wasn’t a tool.

  I wasn’t a pawn.

  I placed one foot, then the other, on the wall under the window. Using the strength in my legs, I pulled and pulled and pulled at the bars. They creaked, slowly bending. My feet broke through the drywall, then cracked the concrete underneath.

  “No one holds me …” I whispered.

  The bars ripped free from the window frame. I flew backward into the opposite wall, then tumbled to the ground. The magic embedded into the bars lashed around my hands, biting into my flesh.

  I gained my feet, turning toward the door as the locks shifted, then opened.

  Laughing, I took out both my guards as they dashed into the room, swords drawn. Twisting and turning, I dodged their clumsy strikes, beating each of them around the head and neck with the crystal bars. A third elf had apparently joined them, but he remained in the hall.

  The first two fell.

  I paused, shifting my stance to face the doorway. I raised my newly acquired weapons before me. The crystal bars were slick with the thick, pale-green blood of the two elves unconscious at my feet. I smiled as I absorbed the power, the magic teeming through that blood into the bars. Fortifying them. Claiming them as my own.

  I flipped the purloined and remade bars in my hands. Their magic no longer seared my skin. “Come and get me.”

  The warrior elf hovering in the hall bared his teeth at me, taking two steps forward.

  I lunged.

  He slammed the door closed.

  Unable to stop in time, I stabbed the steel door, impaling it with one of the crystal bars. Locks, then magic, snapped into place.

  I shrieked in frustration.

  My liege would be called. Woken from her nap. I’d be backed into the corner, and my mind would be ravaged.

  Again.

  And again.

  And I would kneel in the end.

  I would kneel!

  The second bar crumbled in my hand. I’d been gripping it too tightly. Or perhaps I hadn’t fully claimed the elf magic for my own.

  And now I had no weapons.

  One of the elves at my feet groaned. I kicked him in the gut, childishly.

  I was missing something.

  I was always missing something.

  My gaze fell on the now unbarred window.

  What had the woman in the red poncho been doing when I saw her? At the time, I thought she might have been looking for me …

  What if she was looking for a way into the stadium?

  I crossed to the window. It was too small for me to fit my shoulders through, let alone my hips. Magic coated every inch of the exterior of the building.

  I might not be able to get out of the room. But I could destroy what the elves had erected.

  I thrust my hand through the glass of the window, cutting myself. The cuts healed instantly. I grabbed a fistful of the magic there.

  “The wards,” I whispered.

  I gathered the energy to me, thrusting my other hand through the broken window to grip more of it. Then even more. And when I had everything I could hold, I smothered it with my own power. I choked it with my very will, with my need to be free.

  Then I tore it asunder.

  Magic lashed through the room. The cell. My prison.

  I laughed.

  I held the torrent of power. I took it for my own.

  And I laughed.

  The ward magic ebbed, then dissipated. It no longer covered the window. Standing on my tiptoes, I stuck my head outside, craning left, then right, then down. A large swath of the wards had been ripped away from the exterior of the stadium.

  I lifted my face to the darkening sky, spotting a few stars peeking through the clouds. But it was raining. Misting. My skin gobbled up the moisture, soothing the ever-present wound in my forehead.

  I breathed. I breathed in the cool air. I filled myself with it.

  Magic shifted behind me. I stumbled away from the window, pressing my back to the wall, expecting to be attacked.

  Nothing moved. The door was still closed and sealed. Two elves were still unconscious on the floor.

  And a folded piece of paper was resting on the center of the cot.

  That was new.

  I slowly crossed the room, feeling a vague sense of the energy shifting within the building. Hearing faraway shouts. The elves were reacting to the breach in the wards.

  I leaned over the cot. Then, touching it only at the very edges, I unfolded the thick white paper.

  It was a drawing.

  A sketch in charcoal.

  I peered at its strong, thick lines.

  It was a picture of a … a knife. Almost a rapier, really. Simple hilt, blade about the thickness of my thumb.

  It looked achingly familiar.

  The letter R was scrawled in the bottom right corner of the sketch. I hovered my fingers over that initial. I could feel the magic dancing within the charcoal.

  Magic that should have tasted like … apple.

  I … I should have been able to taste magic.

  I looked back at the rendering of the knife, taking in every inch of it, every shadow, every line …

  It was a clue.

  A hint.

  There was something I had to do … something about the knife.

  In the sketch, the knife appeared to be sitting on a bed. Just as the sketch itself was sitting on my cot.

  I glanced at the drawing, then at the cot. Then back to the drawing, comparing the top fold of the sheet. The folds were identical. On my cot and in the drawing.

  Then … I remembered …

  Cha
rcoal drawings tasting of apple … knives … Rochelle … the oracle … the turtle … piloted by Mory … and Warner …

  Warner …

  Warner.

  My Warner trapped in the magic of the dimensional gateway.

  “That’s my goddamn knife …”

  Called forth by my claim, a blade appeared on the bed. It was carved of green stone and pulsed with magic. Magic I couldn’t taste. Because it was mine. My magic.

  I grabbed the hilt of the knife. I raised it before me.

  My blade.

  The dowser’s blade.

  “Jade …” I whispered. That was the stone from which I’d carved the knife. A knife with which I could collect magic. A knife with which I could cut through magic. The elves had made me give it up. She … my liege … Reggie, I had called her. She had forced me to set down the weapon, to abandon my creation.

  “Jade.”

  My name. My knife and my name.

  Reggie would never control me again.

  Even if I had to die to ensure that promise to myself, I would. Gladly. But first, I would set to rights what had gone wrong, the damage I had wrought under Reggie’s command.

  I just had to make sure she couldn’t get hold of me again. I needed to make it so that when the elves sorted out the breach in the wards, when Reggie came through the door — when she came for me — she wouldn’t be able to force me into the corner. She wouldn’t press me down with her power. Not anymore.

  The movement of the elves through the stadium around me increased. There was more shouted conversation. I could hear them, could feel them through the tear in the wards and the magic I’d claimed as my own. A breach they were already attempting to seal.

  But none of that mattered now that I knew who I was. And what I could do. I had to fix the fissure within my own defenses. I had to carve out the weakness, seal the pathway that Reggie had used to tunnel into my mind over and over again.

  I ran my fingers along the edge of the jade blade — my blade — savoring the magic that stirred underneath my touch.

  The wielder of this weapon kneeled to no one.

  I turned the blade toward myself. Tracing the edges of the gemstone with the fingers of my left hand, I wielded the weapon with my right.