I braided my hair into a war-braid, the plait close to my head and turned under, the style exposing the tooth scars at the bottom of my neck and décolleté, revealing the mark left by a demon-iron sword. I strapped on the spine sheath and I secured the hilt of the battle blade in the queue of scarlet hair. It protected my neck from spawn teeth and from beheading. Its hilt was silver-plated forged steel set with garnets. The steel crossguard, silver, and stones glittered through my hair.
On my wrists went cuffs of Mokume Gane gold, studded with stones. Though I seldom wore rings, I placed one on every finger, different stones in each: some polished nuggets, some faceted, some charged with power. Into my ears I slid thick gold and copper hoops. Satisfied that I was wearing enough silk, lace, blades, precious metals, and stones to cause even the most hardened mage-watcher to gawp, I shook my hips, hearing the bells jingle. Oh yeah.
Over my head I settled my amulet necklace, in plain sight, to be worn in public for the first time in ten years. The prime amulet was a four-inch hoop composed of topaz, peridot, amethyst, citrine, and garnet in five inner layers, with a double helping of bloodstone sealing them at top and bottom; seven layers in all, a religious symbolism. The amulet had changed, however, from the conjured stone created by the mage prophetess at my birth. I had chipped it, then mended it, and the crack had filled with a fine, bloodred line like mortar, sealing it together. The center amethyst layer was subtly larger, thicker than the others, and it glowed, just a hint, with power that wasn’t mine. I had been testing the altered prime to see what it would do but I still didn’t know for sure. Today, perhaps reacting to my emotional state, the prime glowed hotly. I positioned it below my breasts, centered on my ribs within easy reach.
Beside it I settled my sigil of office, my visa, a ring of watermelon pink tourmaline, inscribed like the bracelet with “106 Adonai.” One hundred six was the year my visa ran out, 106 Post-Apocalyptic Era. One year from now. If I lived that long. Adonai was a name of the Most High.
Lastly, I clipped on three stones from the time of the first neomages that were filled with wild-magic. The magic sometimes vibrated into my aura. I had little idea what they did, but I liked them. I had set each with a pendant cap and strung them onto my necklace. I added the newest amulets, a bloodstone cat and three damaged, half-repaired crucifixes, scorched and partially melted. The cat was an energy sink. I hoped. I had taken the incantation from the Book of Workings, modified it so I could draw on all the energy at my disposal at one time. A sort of a last-ditch conjure. I hoped I’d never need it. But today might be the day.
I looked again into the mirror. Shock settled its weight across my shoulders. “Seraph stones,” I whispered. Maybe I couldn’t do this after all.
I had never seen the being looking back at me. Last time I had dressed in formal mage attire, I had been a teenager. Now I was a woman. I didn’t look sexy. I didn’t look good. I looked dangerous. Real dangerous. A mess-with-me-and-die woman who would still have every man in sight drooling. And some of the women too.
Well, that was my intention. To take the town fathers by storm.
I tossed the dobok out the window with the last of my supplies. Sleet fell in a heavy patter, dancing off the uniform when it landed on the ice. Zeddy stuck out his head a moment later and jerked with surprise. He stared at me, taking in the hair, the glowing skin and scars, and the exposed flesh. “Holy moly,” he said, mouth and eyes wide, and then he looked around to make sure he hadn’t been overheard. Dragging his eyes back to me, he said, “You sure you want to go like that?” When I nodded, he gave me a half salute and said, “Okay, then. Sorry I can’t be there. Hope someone tapes the meeting for me.” He shook his head. “Horses are ready, Miss Thorn, if you need ’em. Holy freaking moly,” he said again, whispering the oath.
Not trusting myself to speak, I closed the window. I looked as outlandish as I thought. Outlandish as Enclave. For a moment, doubts eddied but I pushed them away. Strength, surprise, and the unexpected. It would save me or stun the elders long enough for me to run.
I pushed the kitchen table to the side and poured a salt ring on the deep turquoise tile, leaving six inches open. The salt wasn’t sea salt, defiled by water and air, but had been mined from the earth, from deep underground. Earth salt for a stone mage. It had a faint bluish-green tint in some light, but in midmorning, even with sleet falling and a heavy cloud cover, it looked white. I entered the circle and sat yogi-fashion on the cold tile, bells tinkling. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the pull on the amulets with which I had decorated myself. Once, it would have taken long minutes to calm my emotions and settle my body into the proper forms, but lately, though I didn’t know why, it was easier. Much easier. Within moments, I sealed the circle with a final handful of salt.
As it closed, power seized me. Power from the beginning of time, heard as much as felt, tasted, and seen. It hummed through me, a drone, an echo of the first Word ever spoken, the first Word of Creation. The reverberation was captured in the core of the earth for me to draw upon, a constant, unvarying power of stone and mineral, the destructive potency of liquid rock and heat. Its vibrations rolled through my bones and pulsed into my flesh, the thrum of strength, the force, the raw, raging might of the earth, a molten mantle, seeking outlet. Finding me, rising within me.
I was a crucible for the incandescent energy—it was mine to use. Mine. I was the strength of the earth and stone, the might of the core, the power of creation. The prime amulet on my chest pulsed softly, harnessing the energies needed for the simple incantation. I needed only enough power to keep myself calm and focused during the coming town meeting.
Until recently, drawing on leftover creation force had been a dangerous moment of temptation. Only a few weeks past, I hadn’t been able to begin such an incantation while wearing the amulets, but had to start without them and then place them around my neck at the right moment. Like my prime amulet, I was different. I didn’t want to look too closely at the change in me, in my life. Maybe someday I’d have the leisure for introspection. Not now.
I breathed, calm just out of reach. The silence of the loft settled about me. I could hear the ticking of the black-pig clock over my shoulder, the sound becoming one with the stillness I sought. My heart rate slowed, decelerated to a methodical, slow pace. In mage-sight, my flesh was a roseate radiance lined with blood rushing through my veins and the bright, terrible tracery of scars down my legs and arms.
The loft pulsed with energy, a bower of neomage safety I had created in the humans’ world. Stones were everywhere, at the tub and bed and gas fireplaces, in every window and doorway, on the floor. Even on the wood beams overhead. My home glowed with pale energy, subtle, harmonious shades of lavender, green, rose, yellow, and bloodred. Mage-sight saw what humans couldn’t, the power beyond physical manifestations. Mage-sight saw the energy of creation in everything. Such power should have been protection enough to keep me safe from an incubus, but this particular beast had access to my blood, which gave it power over me. I shelved that worry, concentrating.
When I was centered and calm, I sent my senses scouring out, drawing power from every stone in the loft, pulling it into myself and my amulets, as I would before battle, in a slow, easy drawing of strength, not fast enough to interrupt the charmed circle, but enough to leach through and into me, like osmosis. As I drew it in, lavender energies misted out of the walls and floor, following the might I pulled from other stones. Startled, half disbelieving, I watched the mist as it moved for the first time in weeks.
As if scenting me, it coalesced into the shape of a cobra with glowing, dark blue eyes and a hint of yellow chatoyency, like blue tigereye stone. A pale hood expanded; its tongue tasted the air. My body tensed. Evil often took the form of a serpent, but this thing didn’t glow with the energies of Darkness. It glittered with the brilliance of Light. Yet even Light could be dangerous to a charmed circle. If it tried to pierce the conjure, its energies would combine with mine, a fusion of wild-magi
c, the kind formed nearly a hundred years ago in the time of the first neomages. The union of disparate energies would discharge into a destructive explosion and splatter me all over the loft. Fire and death everywhere. If it was real.
I blinked. The serpent was still there, coiled on the floor in front of the salt, looking at me, a twenty-foot-long, lavender-and-purple-banded cobra of might. I blinked off my mage-sight and it was still there, a physical beast, but like nothing in nature. I knew that if I touched it, I would feel a real body, sinuous muscle beneath cool scales.
With a slow, hypnotic sway, it inspected the circle, tongue forking out, tasting the energies of the incantation. I sat frozen in the center, having no idea how to stop it from doing whatever it wanted. The serpent was a manifestation of the culled energies of the amethyst sealed in metal ammunition boxes stored below, in the stockroom. Stone that was empty, last time I looked: stones that had been so totally drained that I thought they were dead.
The cobra opened its mouth, exposing white tissue, devoid of life and blood. Hinged fangs lowered from its palate. It was hungry. It wanted in. It swayed, asking, begging. No words were exchanged, but I knew what it wanted; to join with me again.
Again? My mind found the only incantation I could remember, the first small conjure taught to every neomage, a nursery rhyme, almost the first words we spoke, later used as a conjure to calm and prepare, when a mage was afraid. Softly, I said, “Stone and fire, water and air, blood and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and kin prevail.”
It blinked once, hissed, and struck. I flinched, garbling the words of the verse. It pierced through the charmed circle, precisely, cleanly, without disrupting the incantation. There was no discharge of disruptive mage-power. No explosion. But now it was inside with me, writhing on the floor a foot away. Fear whispered through me, raising prickles on my flesh. I didn’t know what to do except continue the incantation, my voice ragged.
The cobra grew more vivid, more intense, more solid with the ancient words. Once an incantation begins, a mage has to see it through, finish the verse, reach the end, close the purpose of the intent. I was breathing hard. My chest ached. As a trickle of sweat slithered down my back, I whispered the verse again, and then stopped, the last syllable fading away.
The serpent’s hood swelled. I raised a hand as if to stop it, and it undulated, moving side to side, its eyes on me, its tongue tasting the air in front of my outstretched palm. “I hear,” it thought at me, hissing. I realized that in speaking an incantation meant to settle oneself before battle, to draw in energies for war against Darkness, I had called it, welcoming its power. And now I didn’t know what to do with it, how to control it, or how to banish it.
“No,” I said. “No.”
The serpent slipped back against the salt of the circle, its hood brushing the circle wall, which should have shattered the conjure but didn’t. “No,” I said again, my fear swelling, thickening, my hand raised against it. The snake glittered, a coruscation of light and might. The elemental mist of its essence rippled, scales shifting, widening. Becoming eyes. A lavender snake with a body of purple eyes.
I was swaying in time with it. I blinked. It blinked. Mesmerizing. Asking. Begging. “Take me. Use me. You made me yours. And I am lonely.”
“I didn’t,” I thought back.
“Yes. Yours.”
I faltered. And the serpent struck, fangs buried in my palm.
My heart stuttered. In a single instant the snake saturated every amulet on me and overflowed, sloughing off the stones, splashing into a puddle of eyes on the tile. The floor heated beneath my thighs. The puddle expanded, splashing wetly against the walls of the conjure, soaking my skirt. But it didn’t melt the salt, didn’t feel like water against my skin; it tingled like electricity, like power. I could hear a soft resonance of bells as it rose in the circle, purple eyes rising like a flood.
My breath was rough, hoarse, my heartbeat fast, an erratic drumming of fear. “No,” I whispered. It ignored me. A pressure like the deeps of the ocean pressed against me. I had never seen or heard of anything like this. The liquid eyes rose over my waist, up to my breasts. I needed to break the charmed circle, but if I did, what would happen to the energies gathered here? Would they explode? Burn? Kill half the town? Power shouldn’t be able to gather, shape itself, and act on its own. The purple liquid that wasn’t wet reached my chin, prickling, burning against my skin. I didn’t know what to do. And I was going to drown in the stuff, whatever it was. A laugh tickled in the back of my throat, hysterical giggles of fear.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t let them harm you,” it promised.
The liquid energy eyes spilled over my lips and down my throat in a torrent. I gasped reflexively, and it flooded my lungs, pungent and sweet, suffocating me. It filled my sinuses, my ears, speeding to my stomach when I gagged and swallowed. My arms lifted, trying to swim, but the stuff was insubstantial, ethereal.
The energies, the eyes, sped into my bloodstream like cobra venom, reaching my heart in a rush. My heartbeat stuttered, a painful irregularity I could feel in my eyes and ears and throat, a heavy pressure in my chest. It swam into my bowels, filled my muscles and tendons, and moved deep into my bones and marrow. It electrified my nerves. Mouth open, no air to breathe, I was drowning. My vision telescoped into pinpoints of purple light. And was gone.
Chapter 4
I opened my eyes slowly, feeling the gummy texture of sleep in the corners. Turquoise glared in my field of vision. Slowly, it resolved itself into my kitchen floor. I was facedown on the tile, arms stretched out, my cold hands in salt. Eyes. I had been drowning in eyes. The purple snake was gone. The water-mist-eyes were gone.
I eased upright, supporting my weight on one hand. The circle was broken, my hands having dislodged the salt when I passed out. But there had been no explosion of wild energies, no fire, death, and destruction. The loft was unchanged, bed stripped, clothes hanging from the armoire doors. In mage-sight, I spotted one difference. There was a purple hue to every stone in the apartment. I lifted my amulets, seeing the same glow. It wasn’t overpowering; it was, in fact, so faint a stranger might not notice.
I looked at my hand. “Seraph stones,” I cursed under my breath. Normally, mage flesh has a pearly peach sheen, even to human eyes. Mine was now slightly darker, vaguely purple. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but it couldn’t be good.
Skirt bells jingling, I stood and found my breath and my balance, and looked down at myself. I was dry and clean, and the salt was still in an almost perfect circle, broken in two narrow places where my hands had swept through it. But the salt was pale lavender. “Habbiel’s pearly, scabrous, decayed, putrid toes!” I said, fury rising with each word.
“Thorn?” A knock sounded at the door.
“In a minute,” I shouted. He didn’t rap again, but he didn’t go away, either. I could almost hear him breathing on the other side of the wood.
Movements jerky, I swept up the salt and put it in a fresh plastic bag, not wanting to contaminate the salt in the original container. I marked the bag with a big black X, and below it, in smaller letters, wrote, DANGER. PURPLE STUFF.
I looked at myself again, and realized that the purple didn’t emanate strictly from my mage-flesh, but more from my scars; a pale, pulsing color where once had been pure, bleached-out white. I cursed so foully that I’d have been branded on both cheeks and forehead had a kirk elder heard.
“Thorn?” The voice was tentative, and I realized I was still shouting. I breathed deeply, pulling in the calm that had always been part of my home. The peace was still there, untainted by the lavender electricity I expected. I breathed several times, each breath slower than the last. When I felt like myself again, I looked down. The purple in my scars had faded to a barely perceptible glow. Even as I watched, it continued to dim. Whatever it was, it wasn’t long-lasting. Maybe the remaining energy in the amethyst had now expended itself. With a final breath, I took my thick leather cloak an
d laid it over my arm, positioning it so I could pull a blade if needed.
The bells on my skirt jingled as I opened the door, to find Rupert standing there alone, black hair pulled back, dressed in unrelieved navy. Around his neck was a primitive necklace I had designed, tiny white pearls and silver beads interspersed between seven large, faceted blue tigereye stones and slivered white shells, like long teeth: like fangs. I stared at the shells and blue tigereye, remembering the serpent’s eyes and wide-open mouth.
“Saints’ balls,” he breathed. “You look . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Rupert had never seen me dressed as a mage, my neomage attributes radiating. Some of my fury abated at the pure wonder in his gaze.
I had been hiding in the human world because I knew—I believed—that no human would allow me to live. Until recently I hadn’t even trusted my friends with my secret. Maybe I should have. Following his eyes, I looked down at my scarred knuckles. The tissue was white again, light spilling from them. “You ready?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He lifted a finger and traced the crisscrossed scars on my cheek. “You’re beautiful.” I felt a flush rise. I would never be beautiful, but the compliment was nice. “Suggestion?” When I shrugged, Rupert took the cloak and draped it across my shoulders, securing it. “Keep all this hidden, even your skin, until the right moment.”
“When will that be?”
“You’ll know. Anyone who can wear this in public? You’ll know.” He waved his hands over mine and said, “Make that go away till then too. Okay? All at once, when the time’s right, throw off the cloak with a flourish, like a bullfighter. And let your skin do this glow thing. It’ll stop them in their tracks.”
“Too bad you can’t do it for me. You have a better sense of the dramatic than I do.”
“No straight woman will ever have the style of a gay man, honeybunch,” he said smugly. “And if you can get some mage-clothes my size, I’ll start a new style that will take the human world by storm.”