Shimmer: A Novel (33 page)

“Not sure,” Logan said. “It’s almost as if it’s around the next corner, beyond the next street, always ahead but never here, if you know what I mean.”

“Not sure I do,” Thalia said. “Maybe it senses us looking for it.”

“That’s not it,” Logan said. “Something is definitely out there but it’s… waiting. For what, I don’t know. Not ready to show itself.”

“Since we can’t figure out where it will appear next,” Gideon said. “Maybe it’s time to go on the offensive.” He looked across the backseat at Thalia. “Are you ready to try?”

“Try what?” Grainger asked, watching them in the rearview mirror.

“Creating a rift to the other world,” Thalia said somberly. “Some of us Walkers have the ability to open rifts.”

“And you’re one of them?”

“I was, yes, but it’s been a while,” Thalia said. “It’s not foolproof, though. I might not be able to open a rift to the right world or any rift at all.”

“How can we improve your odds of success?”

At the start of this exchange, Logan had twisted around in his front seat to watch Thalia’s reactions, ready to divert the conversation if he sensed her falling off the rails of lucidity. They had to be careful not to back her into a corner, psychologically speaking. Thalia pursed her lips and stared out the side window. Lost in thought or fright? Logan couldn’t say which. He was about to intercede with what would probably be a lame excuse for returning home when Thalia’s eyes widened and she gave a decisive nod. She caught the reflection of Grainger’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Take me to the place where the bus crashed.”

The NJ Transit bus and the Dodge pickup truck were gone. Emergency vehicles had transported the injured to Underwood Memorial Hospital and the dead to the morgue. No police presence remained behind. The only remnants of the bus crash were cosmetic: an assortment of skid marks across the middle of Kings Highway, oil stains treated with sawdust, and tiny shards of plastic glittering under the streetlights along the shoulder of the road. Other than those minimal visual clues, nothing remained to inform drivers of passing cars that a tragedy had occurred several hours ago. Unless those drivers had the preternatural senses of Thalia Walker. When Grainger asked her “Why here?” she simply stated, “Because it’s the last place the rift manifested.”

Grainger swung the cruiser to the shoulder of Kings Highway and parked in front of the white stone Hadenford Public Library. “Okay. Now wh—”

Logan noticed the entranced expression fall across Thalia’s face like a veil, the faraway look in her eyes. Before the cruiser came to a halt, he jumped out and opened her door, taking her arm and guiding her to the curb. In her present state, she might wander into the middle of the road, to the exact point where the rift had appeared. Probably so worried about disappointing them that she had too readily surrendered to her paranormal instincts. Trance-walking down the center of the town’s main thoroughfare at night was a potentially fatal risk, even if the rift was long gone. Traffic was light, but steady, with the average vehicle speed in excess of forty miles per hour.

“Closer,” Thalia whispered.

Logan checked her eyes. Nobody home. “This is close enough,” he said. In case she decided to disregard his advice, he maintained one arm across her shoulders. “You’ll have to work from here.”

She nodded, but Logan waited for her to focus on her surroundings.

The others joined them. Fallon stood on Thalia’s right side, opposite Logan, and placed her hands around the other woman’s right hand. “Thalia?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You okay?”

“Mm-hm,” Thalia murmured. “I can sense the disruption here. It was a forced rift. Not natural.”

“What’s that mean?” Grainger asked Gideon.

“Some rifts between worlds occur naturally,” Gideon said. “This one was more of a… rip in the fabric of our reality.”

“A forced entry? Breaking and entering?”

Gideon nodded. “What do they call it on the news? A home invasion? Well, this was a home-world invasion.”

Thalia frowned and shook her head. “Destruction,” she said with almost anthropological detachment. “Lots of casualties. This wasn’t random. A planned assault for maximum carnage.” She blinked rapidly, glanced at Logan and Fallon. “I’m okay.”

Logan sighed, lowered his arm from her shoulder. “Welcome back.”

“There’s a conflict here,” she said.

“Conflict? Hell, it was a full-blown frontal assault,” Grainger said.

“I’m talking about the rift,” Thalia said, shaking her head impatiently. She was wringing her hands. Logan had the impression that each bit of information she doled out came at a psychological cost. “It doesn’t fit. There’s a miasma lingering here.”

“Carnifex?” Gideon asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Don’t you sense it? Any of you?”

Exchanged looks and head shakes followed. Logan worried about her confidence. He said, “I would probably only sense it if he planned to return here.”

“Carnifex is anything but subtle,” Thalia said. “Brute force, destruction, carnage. That’s him in a nutshell.”

“So what’s the conflict?” Grainger asked.

“This rift was coordinated, a planned and timed assault on a mass of humanity in motion,” she said and waited for them understand. When they remained confused, she sighed. “I don’t think he’s capable of that degree of sophistication.”

“Maybe he had a magical aid,” Gideon suggested. “A talisman.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I think another possibility is more likely.”

“Someone is helping him,” Fallon guessed.

Thalia nodded. “Somebody with more magical acumen than Carnifex possesses.”

“Somebody with a grudge against humanity? Or somebody who enjoys watching the carnage from afar?”

Thalia shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Regardless,” Gideon said. “Our goal remains the same. Remove the watcher’s tool—Carnifex, in other words—and the carnage ends.”

“Let’s begin then,” Thalia said. She unbuttoned the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse and rolled them back. Generally, the Walker women wore long sleeves in public to conceal the golden sigils that adorned their skin. Fewer questions that way. And the habit dovetailed with Ambrose’s “Discretion is the better part of Walkers” philosophy.

“Sure you’re up to this?” Logan asked quietly. Then for Grainger’s benefit, he added, “It’s already been a long night.”

“I’ll give it a try,” Thalia said. “Gideon, you know what to do?”

“Right with you.”

“What’s she talking about?” Grainger asked.

“If she opens the rift,” Gideon said. “We go through. The two of us. Walker protocol.”

“What about me?”

Gideon looked at him. “I would strongly suggest you not try to follow.”

“Wait!” Logan said. “Before you start, take this.” He removed his crystal amulet and placed it over Thalia’s head. “Liana made these to protect us from our fears over there.”

“Thanks, Logan,” Thalia said. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Instinctively, they formed a loose circle around her, with the intention of shielding her spell-casting from any pedestrians or passing motorists. Her hands tapped and traced sigils along her forearms as her lips formed a series of whispered incantations, almost a soft hiss of continual sound rather than individual words. Thalia’s magic differed from Liana’s in that regard. Whereas Liana often shouted magical commands, Thalia seemed to coax magic from the ether, sometimes silently, and usually with more versatility and effectiveness. Until Thalia’s rift accident, she had been Liana’s clear magical superior. Her loss had been a devastating blow to the Walker ranks. Though Logan was glad to see her back in action, he worried about the cost of pushing her too far too soon. Thalia’s forearms had begun to glow, and her eyes had gone vacant again.

“I can see it,” she whispered at last. “Where it ripped open, like a psychic echo… the damage is still there… a wound, recently closed… I’m reaching out to it, feeling the contours, searching for the weakest spot… yes, thinnest here… if I can prod it, just slip through that spot… I think I can open it again.”

Gideon pulled his sword from its scabbard, shifted his grip slightly, then nodded in anticipation. A warrior, he was fixated on the imminent battle. Thalia similarly focused on her magical task, reopening the rift. Logan, douser of bad vibes and all things paranormally nasty, felt his gut lurch in dread.

“Careful!” Logan said to Thalia and hoped she heard him.

He gave Fallon a meaningful look. She had released Thalia’s hand when the older woman had begun her pattern tracing. No physical contact. Logan nodded urgently. Fallon frowned, shook off her nerves and indecision with a long exhalation, and reached a gentle hand toward Thalia’s neck. She paused, glanced at Logan; he nodded again. Contact there wouldn’t interfere with the spell-casting. Fallon laid her hand against the nape of Thalia’s neck. At the moment of contact, Fallon gasped, her back arching as if a jolt of electricity had coursed down her spine.

Thalia’s body began to twitch.

Fallon’s eyes opened wide in alarm.

“Stop!” Logan shouted, reaching for Thalia’s glowing arms.

Gifted with hyperacuity, Gideon was too quick for Logan. “No,” he said, stepping in front of Logan and catching his hand. “Let her finish!”

“You don’t understand—”

Thalia screamed.

Fallon grunted in pain, staggered sideways, striking a newspaper dispenser with her hip before falling to the sidewalk in a heap. She whimpered softly and writhed on the ground.

The moment Thalia screamed, the glow around her arms winked out. Then her eyes rolled up, showing only the whites. Her legs crumpled and she fell unconscious toward the ground.

Grainger tried to catch her, but Gideon beat him to it. He’d been too stunned by the swift chain of events to stop Fallon’s collapse, but he recovered in time to break Thalia’s fall. “She’s burning up.”

“What’s going on?” Grainger asked

“I don’t know,” Gideon said from a crouch, caressing Thalia’s face.

The police chief’s hard gaze settled on Logan. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“I sensed something bad was about to happen, but Gideon wouldn’t—”

“Sorry, Logan,” Gideon said. “Forgot about your talent. I thought, well, I haven’t been in group dynamic mode in a—”

“Everybody ignores me!”

“Said I was sorry.”

“Why bring me out here if you refuse to—?”

“Enough, Logan!” Gideon said. “Live and learn.”

“Right,” Logan said, mentally kicking himself for becoming sulky when—
Fallon!
“Damn it!” he whispered fiercely as he rushed to her side. He kneeled beside her and checked for cuts or abrasions. Physically, she seemed fine. He placed a hand on her head, another under her jaw and examined her eyes. They were fluttering as she moaned quietly. “I think she’s coming out of it.”

Grainger kneeled on the other side of her. “Yes.”

“Logan,” Fallon whispered as her eyes began to track and focus. “Thought that was you touching me. Felt the swoopy-loopies.”

“What’s she talking about?”

“Inside joke.”

“So she’s making sense?”

Logan nodded. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“So what happened here?”

“I’m not sure,” Logan said. “Thalia will probably know when she wakes up. If she remembers anything, that is.”

“What do
you
think happened?”

“When she pushed against the rift,” Logan said, “something pushed back.”

Chapter 46

When the rock spire first began to topple, Liana couldn’t help herself: she screamed so loud the cry might have been ripped from her throat by a demon that thrived solely on vocal expressions of sheer terror. In this hell dimension, such a demon might even exist. But she wasn’t looking for excuses. Of all the ways one might possibly die, she had always considered burning among the worst way to go. And the idea of falling several hundred feet into a sea of molten magma increased her fear of immolation beyond rational boundaries. She was about to take a swan dive into temperatures hot enough to melt stone. With that grim thought foremost in her mind, she thought she had an undeniable right to one last scream of defiance, of protest—but mostly, of sheer terror.

Barrett scrambled from the flattened tip of the broken and falling spire or rock to what became the top side, sword clutched in his right hand, Liana dangling from his left. If her nerve-shattering scream caused him to release his grip on her to cover his ears, she could have forgiven him for the lapse even as she plummeted to certain fiery death below. Well, almost. But somehow he held on and that incurred a debt she’d never be able to repay. Especially since, despite Barrett’s impressive heroics, she remained convinced their deaths were imminent.

The broken spire was too short to span the crevasse that had opened in front of them moments enough, too short to form a natural, if temporary bridge to solid ground. Just before the spire was horizontal, Barrett leaped forward, his sword held high. From his other hand, Liana swung precariously, feeling like a human anchor about to tug him down to his death. A quick glance upward showed her that he wouldn’t make it across the widening gap to the far side—not by a long shot. If he had let her drop, he might have had a chance, but with her added weight they were both doomed. She made a silent apology a split second before they slammed into the far wall with jarring force.

Grunting with the impact, she waited for the moment when inertia would release them and they would hurtle to the raging sea of molten rock below. If they were lucky, they would strike a spur of rock hard enough to render them senseless or kill them outright. Better that than a straight drop to the fires below, hot enough to dissolve the flesh from their bones before melting their bones as well. In a few minutes, no trace would remain to indicate that two humans had ever walked across this hell world. And yet, somehow, the moment never came. Inertia never let go.

They hung suspended from the cliff face.

Beneath them, the falling spire shattered against its thicker, stubby base, breaking into several massive pieces that struck the river of lava with such force that, for a few seconds, eruptions of magma lapped upward like hungry tongues anticipating two human morsels.