But maybe . . . maybe not for receptive?
Cathrynne tried to focus, tangentially aware that Kal was struggling with Berti Baako. Gavriel had dragged himself to standing and was delivering a series of dire threats to Markus, distracting him long enough to buy a few more seconds.
But that’s all she had. Because Ash was coming her way with a look of implacable hatred, and she had kaldurite stones so Cathrynne couldn’t touch her with ley.
She quickly switched the rings. The projective topaz was now on her right hand, the sugilite on the left. Please, Minerva, I’m surrendering to your will. Help me save them. She felt the topaz flare, and this time, the sugilite flowed inward, its cool, healing energy racing through her veins, through her heart and mind, reading her emotions, and then flowing back out again to join the threads of fiery topaz.
A sheen of sweat broke across her brow as she braided the opposing forces together, just as she’d seen Lara do. They fought each other tooth and nail. She feared they’d tear her apart. Perhaps tear the whole world apart.
“To me!” she cried through clenched teeth. “Hurry!”
Kal wrenched herself free of Berti’s grasp. Gavriel was near enough to take the girl in his arms, folding his wings around her.
“Stop!” Markus strode forward, his face white. “You’ll all die?—”
Cathrynne staggered to Kal and Gavriel as the lines of the box joined together. Then came a clap of silent thunder, a deep vibration that made her cracked ribs ache. Wait, a panicked voice in her head screamed. Where are we going?
The warp and weft of reality folded, and Cathrynne felt the sickening lurch of falling, again and again, through the spaces between.
Chapter 33
Kal
She gasped for breath, panic clawing at her throat.
Kal had gone from the rainswept grounds of the Lenormand School to a cold, clear night in what looked like the Zamir Hills, which wouldn’t be so bad except that she was buried up to her neck in hardpan. She tried to wiggle a single toe. Nothing budged.
“Help! Anyone!” The plea emerged as a barely audible wheeze. A gibbous moon cast hard-edged shadows across the cracked earth.
She remembered groping through the wet grass for her kaldurite stones after the White Foxes slashed open the lining of her coat, spilling them everywhere. After that it got blurry. She’d felt a strange shockwave ripple through her. Then the sensation of free-falling but with no up or down.
A jarring impact and she was here, only a head sticking out of earth hard as granite, like she’d materialized in the middle of it. She could turn her face and not much at that, but in a sense she’d gotten lucky. A little lower and she’d be dead of suffocation. It was hard to imagine a worse way to go.
Something moved at the edge of sight. Kal’s head jerked toward a pile of rocks. Her mouth went dry as a scorpion sidled into a patch of moonlight. One of the big desert queens with claws like wire cutters. From ground level, it looked even bigger.
Well, maybe there were worse ways after all.
Kal licked her dry lips. Scorpions had poor eyesight. The way they hunted was by sensing the tiny vibrations of prey through their eight legs. Of course, Durian had told her that.
The scorpion crept forward a few steps, then stopped. She tried to sink deeper into the earth, but it was pointless, she couldn’t move anything below her neck. The forcing spell must have woken it up.
“Actually, they’re nocturnal,” Durian said. “It was probably awake.”
He squatted to her left, so she could only see him from the corner of her eye.
“You’re not helping,” she hissed.
“What can I do? I’m a figment of your imagination.” Never had his donkey bray been more irritating. “They only attack when they feel threatened. I doubt it will mess with you?—”
The scorpion skittered closer. Close enough to count the armored segments of its body, the jointed legs picking delicately across the sand. It was about as long as her forearm, with a shiny black carapace.
Kal tried not to appear threatening. She was, after all, only a head. But the scorpion must have been riled up by the spell that had planted her in the ground like a fence post. Its tail lifted, preparing to sting. The barb at the tip carried enough poison to kill a pack mule. Kal squeezed her eyes shut?—
And heard a solid chthunk a few inches away. She opened her eyes. A knife pinned the scorpion to the earth, where it twitched weakly. She let out an undignified sob.
“Are you okay?” It was the blonde cypher.
“Can’t move,” she rasped.
