Ever After (The Hollows 11)

Chapter Eight

The red sun of the ever-after hurt my eyes, and I squinted, holding up a hand as I stood on dusty red soil made of pulverized rock and felt the gritty wind push at me. Al and I had come in on a slightly raised plateau. Before us snaked a dry riverbed. To our left was a slump of broken rock where Loveland Castle was in reality. Sprigs of waist-high yellow grass were scattered about, and a few stunted trees were all that was left of the woods that surrounded the castle in reality. Here in the ever-after, it was desolate.

Between us and the pile of rock, a ley line shimmered, more of a heat image than anything else in the sunbaked wind. The line was making me feel slightly nauseated, almost seasick. The leak? I wondered. As a gargoyle, Bis would know, but he'd be hard to wake until the sun went down.

Beside me, Al was again dressed in his familiar crushed green velvet coat, lace and all. Black boots with buckles scuffed the dirt, and he jauntily sported an obsidian walking cane and a matching tall hat. Dark round glasses protected his eyes, but I could tell it wasn't enough, as his expression was pained and the sun seemed to be picking away at our auras as we stood. The sun was one of the reasons the demons hid underground in vast caverns overlain with the illusion of the outside. The fact that structures tended to fall apart on the surface was another.

It was odd seeing Al, with his top hat and elegant grace, poking about with the tip of his cane as he found evidence of other demons. "No surface demons," I said. The hot air hurt my chest.

"The sun feels worse today." Al crouched to turn over a rock that someone had shifted.

I winced as the wind whipped my toga and tiny pinpricks of rock hit my bare legs. All around me were the telltale signs of other demons: a footprint here, a scuff there-an oval impression in the dust that looked like the bottom of Newt's staff. They'd been here, seen the damage, incidentally obliterating the evidence that Ku'Sox might have been here earlier to make the leak in my line worse. I sort of knew how the I.S. felt.

Al slowly exhaled as he stood, his expression blank as he looked out over the dry riverbed to the scrub and trees. His fingers fumbled in a tiny pocket, and he sniffed a pinch of brimstone. "It's a damn ugly place for a ley line."

"I wasn't planning on making one to begin with," I said, then shivered when a wave of ever-after coated me, falling away to show he'd changed me out my toga for head-to-toe black leather. No bra or panties, but at least the gritty wind wasn't scouring me like the sun was stripping my aura, and this outfit, unlike most, fitted me, not Ceri.

Oh God, Ceri. I was no closer to getting them back than when I'd got here.

Unaware of my thoughts, Al shoved a prissy pink-and-white lace parasol at me. "Here."

The frail thing clashed with the leather, but immediately I felt a sense of relief in its shadow. I'd seen Ku'Sox. He knew I was aware of what he'd done. He'd make his demands soon enough, and until then, I had to believe that Ceri and Lucy were okay. "Thanks," I said as I looked at the stack of rubble. "Shouldn't the line be over the rocks? That's where I came in."

Al began picking his way to my ley line, his cane knocking jagged chunks of rock from his path. "Lines drift," he said, his head down. "Move. They're like magnets repelling each other. They will shift across continents given enough time and impetus. They only appear to be stationary because they've balanced with each other ages ago. Yours here . . ." Al sniffed in consideration. "It likely won't move much anymore. Has it always been this size?"

I nodded as I came even with him and faced the barely visible shimmer in the air. The ley line the university was built on was wide enough that you could drive a team of horses down it for a quarter mile. The one in my graveyard was about four feet wide and twenty feet long, an admittedly small line. Mine here was about the same, maybe a little longer.

Al pressed his lips together, puffing his air out as he gazed at seemingly nothing, but he was probably looking at my line with his second sight. "You got out fast. The longer it takes, the wider the wound."

"Really?" So a small line was a good thing, which made me wonder who made the line in my graveyard. Then I wondered who had taken forever to get out of the one at the university. Al maybe?

Walking the length of the shimmer in the air, Al turned and strolled back, the line a haze between us. "A line this size can't be leaking this much on its own."

"It wasn't when I left it." I cocked my hip, feeling naked without my usual shoulder bag.

Al's focus landed on me. "Can you hear it?" he asked, and my lips puckered in distaste. "You're not using your second sight," he added, and I shook my head, tucking a gritty strand of hair behind an ear. But at his dramatic prompting, I exhaled and opened my second sight.

The ringing worsened, scraping across my awareness in a discordant jangle the way the red sun seemed to rub my skin raw. But as bad as it sounded, it looked even uglier. The line was the usual red shimmer at chest height, but there was a sharply defined line of purple at its center running the entire length, thickest at the center and thinning to nothing at the ends. It was almost black at its core, and streamers of fading red were funneling into it like bands of energy slipping into a black hole. I could actually see the leak as it sucked in everything around it, and it made my stomach twist.

"Is it safe to use like that?" I said to Al, looking distorted and red through the line's energy. Behind him, the rubble loomed ominously.

He shrugged. "We used it to get here."

Distressed, I put a hand to my middle and dropped my second sight. "Al," I said. "That purple core wasn't there the last time we were here."

"I know."

"What did Ku'Sox do to it?" I said, frustrated.

Hands on his hips, Al searched the line with his eyes. He reminded me of Jenks, somehow, even though he didn't look anything like him. "I don't know."

He believed me. Relieved, I eased my shoulders down. I debated walking through the line to stand beside him, then edged around it as he had done, my boots kicking rocks and pebbles out of my way. "So-o-o," I drawled, feeling small beside him. "How do you unbalance a ley line?"

Shifting his arms at his side, he glanced at me and then away. "No idea," he said, looking as if it had physically hurt him to admit it. "Tell you what. Toddle through it to the other side to reality and see what it looks like from there."

I backed up a step. "Seriously?"

Frowning, he gave me a once-over, the wind blowing his hair about his glasses. "Get in the line, will yourself through, and see what the line looks like from reality. If we're lucky, it won't be like this. Maybe it's merely a curse we can break."

I hesitated, then jumped when he swooped forward and took my arm, stepping us into the line together. "Hey!" I yelped as my stomach dropped and the sensation of an unending chalkboard scrape serrated over my nerves. Stiffening, I yanked out of his grip, but I didn't leave the line since he was still standing in it. If he could take it, I could, too.

Nauseated, I brought up my second sight. The purple line was so close I could touch it. My heart pounded, and little pinpricks of energy seemed to hit me. By all appearances, the line was sucking in energy, but the discordant jangle clearly showed it was giving something off as well.

"I'll stay here in the line," Al said, and I swallowed hard. "That way you can tell me what you can see. Do you think you are capable of that?"

"Sure." I licked my lips, then wished I hadn't as my tongue came away gritty.

"Now, maybe?" Al prompted as he tugged his sleeves down. "It's going to take me hours to get the sand out of my hair. And stay out of that purple shit."

I looked at the evil purple line, swirls of red vanishing at its black core. "Not a problem." Taking a slow breath, I closed my eyes and willed myself across the realities. It was different from using a line to jump, and demons seldom did it unless they were dragging an unwilling slave across realities-it was akin to taking a horse downtown when everyone else had a hovercar.

The whine from the line shifted, and I opened my eyes, seeing a ghostlike Al still standing beside me with a shimmer of red between us. The air lacked the bite of burnt amber, and the damned wind that always seemed to be blowing in the ever-after was gone. I could hear birds, and under my feet were weeds and grass. The sound of running water was faint, and tall trees leafed out for spring stood around me. Exhaling, I turned. Behind me Loveland Castle was whole again, albeit a dumpy little building falling apart-one man's dream of nobility crumbling from neglect. Noble ideas tended to do that when left alone.

"Well?" Al prompted, and I turned to him, catching my balance in surprise. The weirdness of the line was impacting everything. The vision of the dusty, sunbaked surface of the ever-after was superimposed over the lush greenery of the raised garden area of the castle, but the purple-and-black line looked about the same from this side as the other. Ugly.

I lowered the parasol and squinted up at the yellow sun. "It's hard to tell. Mind if I step away and see what it looks like from outside the line?"

"Hurry up about it," he grumped, and I took several hasty steps backward until the unsettling scrape across my nerves vanished. My soft headache went with it, and I took a breath of clean air. I was completely in reality, and I brought out the phone from my back pocket, checking the time. I had about fifteen minutes until Jenks summoned me, and knowing Al was becoming impatient, I texted Trent I was okay and to have Jenks give me another hour.

Unfortunately, the line looked about the same from this reality, though the grating whine that remained was a slightly higher pitch. Snapping my phone closed, I looked over the area to try to determine if anyone had been here. The weeds right under the line were all ramrod straight, as if they were being tugged upward. It was weird, and crouching just outside the line, I ran a hand under it, watching the grass spring back. The ground between the clumps of weeds looked as if it had been vacuumed.

I stifled a shiver and rose. Thinking my parasol must look silly, I closed it. They did have tours at the castle, occasionally. I could see no evidence that anyone had been here in weeks, and I stepped back into the line. Al seemed to relax as I became slightly more real to him, slightly closer to his reality. "Well?" he prompted.

I shrugged, scuffing my boots in the grass. "It looks the same, but the pitch of the whine is higher. The grass, though . . ." I kicked at a tuft. "It's growing funny. Straight up, like it's being pulled. Even the ground looks like anything not nailed down got sucked up into it."

"Maybe it did." Al ducked under the purple line, shuddering as he came up on the other side, closer to me. "The purple seems to be a physical manifestation of a heavy leak of energy."

"Where's it going?" I asked. "The energy, I mean?"

Al held his arms behind his back, adopting a posture of lecture that I recognized from our days and nights in his kitchen/lab. "When the sun is up, energy flows from reality into the ever-after; when the sun goes down, the flow reverses." His voice echoed, ghostlike. "The problem is that less is flowing into the ever-after than is going out. That purple line? I don't know what in the two worlds that is. It appears to disrupt the natural ebb and flow, sucking in energy like an event horizon. Making it worse than it should be."

Event horizon? I wish I'd paid more attention in advanced ley line physics.

Al sighed, and I willed myself back to the ever-after. The wind hit me like a slap, and I popped my parasol back open. "I'm sorry," I said as I walked around the line to join him.

"For what?" he said sarcastically. "You've done so much."

I fidgeted. "For making the line to begin with, I suppose. How did you balance yours?"