Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“I thought Aeslinn’s element was earth,” I said.

“It is. But he has an alliance with some of the Alorestri—the water fey. He must have hundreds of them in there, to support something like this.”

“Then they need to be targeted first,” Mircea said, his eyes glowing.

I knew that look; he was talking mentally to his vampires, somewhere on the field. And they were listening. Across the wide expanse of burning corpses, ruined, smoking machinery and walking mountains, there was a sudden surge of darting figures, all headed in the same direction.

“They’re on their way,” he affirmed. “Shall we make a door for them?”

“Whatever we do, Aeslinn’s people will seal it up right after,” Pritkin warned. “You’ll have a minute, maybe less, to get your men through.”

“It will be enough,” Mircea said calmly. “And they’re not men.”

“Tell them to get ready,” I said, and put my hands on the shield. It hummed under my palms, resonating softly like a struck tuning fork or a song played just out of range. It was strangely beautiful, like the rest of Faerie, which was still the prettiest hell I’d ever seen. I closed my eyes and reached for power—

And had a rush of it hit me so hard that I went down.

I hadn’t expected that. Had assumed it would be the same as when I summoned the Pythian power. But this bond that the three of us had, this trine, was way more responsive.

Pritkin had caught me—I knew those arms—but he didn’t pull me away. This was our once chance and he knew it. I held on, power sizzling through me, just this side of pain, and felt the outermost layer of the great shield start to liquify under my hands.

There was so much power, raw and unformed, boiling around between me and the shield, that it felt like it might consume me at any second. It was waiting for a command, I could feel it, but I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how much I needed. The shield was huge and was being supported by a magic I didn’t understand. If I moved too soon, the spell might fail and alert Aeslinn to what was going on.

And jury-rigged god or not, we couldn’t fight everyone.

This had to work the first time, so I poured more power into my hands, and watched a golden wash of it start to creep over the ice.

“Almost here,” Mircea murmured. “And our enemies are noticing; they’re in pursuit.”

I ignored him and strained, channeling everything I could, watching the golden glow spill over an area the size of a small house. The power was melting more and more of the outermost layers of the shield, to the point that I was standing in a small flood as my hands and then arms sank into it. Ice-cold water splashed over my feet, soaked the bottom of the robe, made my toes go numb.

But still I called for more.

“It’s not working,” Pritkin said, his voice tight. “It’s not going to be enough.”

“I haven’t started the spell yet,” I told him.

“What?”

“This is spill over. From the massing of power. I haven’t cast anything yet.”

“Why the hell not? What are you waiting for?”

“That,” I said, as the wind of an approaching army fluttered my hair.

One chance I thought grimly. Make it count. For Billy—

“Astara,” I said, and a second later, I was flying.

The blow back from the casting felt like I’d taken a baseball bat to the chest, one swung by a silverback gorilla. I felt like I’d broken a rib; it felt like I’d broken all of them. And then I hit down, not on the ground, but on a mound of the dead.

It was bad, with stabbing pain lancing through me. But it would have been much worse, except that Pritkin had come with me. He’d gotten a shield up at the last second that took the brunt of the backlash, but he hadn’t had time to form a proper one. As a result, an amorphous mass of blue sloshed around us as we rolled down the slope, and were attacked by the weapons of the dead.

Clouds of levitating guns, knives and potion bombs threw themselves at us, including something that exploded underneath us and then boiled up on all sides, olive green and a thick as the smoke from a witch’s cauldron. It didn’t get through the shield, but it obscured our view. We hit the ground and rolled blindly for a moment, before Pritkin managed to put on the breaks. I just lay there, trying and failing to breathe, wondering if I ever would again. And then the smoke finally cleared and I found myself looking up—

At a huge golden pentagram opening up inside Aeslinn’s massive shield.

It was big, I thought blankly.