“I don’t think they understood what you wanted.”
She gave him a sidelong grin. “Doesn’t matter. We can just number the zones.”
Nikolas pulled out a pad of paper and sketched as she painted a line across the hall, then to one side by the wall, she painted 7:10. “The seven is on this side of the shift. The colon is the shift itself, and the ten is on the other side. Make sense?”
He nodded. “It does.” He pointed down the hall. “One thing—we don’t want to number that zone. We might go all the way around the house and come at this hall from the other side. If we label that ‘zone two’ right now and keep numbering zones as we find the shifts, this area might end up getting labeled ‘zone nine’ on the other side. To avoid confusion, I think the only zone we can label right now is the great hall.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” She sat back on her heels. “So the only things we should map right now are the floor plan and the shifts. We can label everything afterward.”
“Right.” He squatted beside her, leaned forward, and gave her a quick, hard kiss.
Hey. That wasn’t playing by any of the rules either one of them had set up. She scowled, disturbed, maybe a little angry, and maybe more than a little delighted. “Stop that.”
“I need to hear you say it.” Nikolas’s dark eyes were intense, heated, and far too close for her comfort. “Say, ‘Nikolas, I want you to stop that.’”
He wanted to hear the truth or falsehood in what she said. “No. I’m not going to play your games.”
“I’m not playing any games, remember?”
Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. Turning her face away, she stood as she asked, “Then what the hell are you doing?”
“I can’t leave you alone. I don’t want to.” He rose to stand beside her, still too close. “I heard the lie in your voice when you said last night was the last night.”
“Screw you, Nik.” She gave him a look filled with bitter hurt. “I heard the truth in yours, when you said as soon as you got me out of your system, you’re gone.”
His expression changed. As he reached out to her, a low rumbling noise started and rose in volume until Sophie could feel it vibrating through her feet.
Dread bolted through her. “What is that? It sounds like an earthquake.”
“It’s Morgan,” Nikolas snarled. “He’s calling up the land magic.”
They raced back to the great hall and the front window, where the rest of the men had gathered, their expressions grim. Slowly the rumble died away. Nikolas shouldered his way to the window. There were too many men in the way for Sophie to follow him, so she climbed on the hood of the Mini to look out.
The low rumble began and rose in intensity. Rubbing a clear spot on the dirty window to peer through, she saw Morgan kneeling on the lawn, hands flattened, his pose similar to the one Nikolas had used when he had buried the Hounds. Morgan’s head and shoulders were bowed, and even from that distance, she could see the strain in his body. Behind him, a tree toppled over and crashed into the roof of the cottage.
Rage and fear hit in equal measures. “He’s destroying my property!”
Nikolas said harshly, “This must be how he broke the crossover passageways. He’s using land magic to try to break through to the house. Can he do it?”
She sank both hands into the hair at her temples and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to think. Could Morgan do it? This piece of land wasn’t in alignment with that piece of land. Like Nikolas’s morningstar, any kind of missile wouldn’t make a direct hit.
But this wasn’t a missile. This was a kind of magic she had never encountered before, and if Nikolas could call upon the land magic to bury thirty Hounds, what could Morgan do?
Somehow he could call upon the land magic Powerfully enough to break entire crossover passageways.
Opening her eyes again, she confronted nine sets of eyes watching her intently. Reluctantly she told them, “He doesn’t carry Djinn magic, so he might not be able to get inside the house, but he might be able to bury the house with us in it.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nikolas’s eyes narrowed. “But the house isn’t entirely in his dimension, right?”
“If his reach goes far enough and he causes enough damage, I don’t think that’s going to matter. What if he gets the land magic to swallow most of it up and we can’t find a way to get out of the other parts? We’ll still be trapped, and we’ll still die.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand how all this works, but he is causing the earth to quake out there—and we’re feeling it in here—so to a certain extent what he is doing will affect us. I’ve never encountered a magic user of his strength before.”
Immediately Nikolas said, “We have to step up our game. Mapping the house and labeling the shifts just became a group effort. We’ve got to get this done so we can analyze our findings and figure out if there’s a pattern we can use to reach Lyonesse.”
He didn’t say what they were going to do if they couldn’t reach Lyonesse, Sophie noted, and nobody asked him. He went on to explain how they were going to map.
Sophie would locate the shifts and move on, leaving the men to work in pairs to paint the borders, test and catalog the time differences. When each pair finished, they would run to catch up. The process would be bumpy, and there would be some time lags as they moved through each shift, but it was still the quickest way to get the job done.
“And it’s very important to make note of whatever we’re seeing outside the windows,” Sophie added. “We need to try to figure out if there’s a pattern—or if anything seems familiar to you.”
As she said it, she prayed, please let there be a pattern. Please let someone see something they recognize from home.
“Grab supplies and be quick,” Nikolas told them. “Get food, water, lanterns, and tools. We might have to force our way into spaces. When we head out, we won’t stop until we’re done.”
She and Nikolas stood in tense silence as they waited for the men to join them. The low rumble started again, shaking through their feet. It reached a peak, then subsided.
She couldn’t imagine what kind of Power it took to cause that quake repeatedly. Morgan couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. He would have to rest at some point. If he wasn’t able to break through by evening, they might get a respite overnight.
That did little to make her feel better in this moment. Needing to feel the simple, animal comfort of Nikolas’s proximity, she moved to stand beside him, and in response, he rested a hand at the nape of her neck. She hooked her fingers in a belt loop of his pants. Neither one of them said anything, for which she was grateful. They had both shown themselves quite capable of ruining a moment, but this time they refrained.
Then the men returned, rounding the corner at a jog, and they began. They went down the hall, discovering a library and a chapel and stairs.
“Shift,” she said, squatting to draw a quick line with the chalk near one corner of the chapel. Rhys and Cael paused to finish up, while the rest of the group moved on.
There were books in the library, she saw to her amazement, and manuscripts, and trunks, presumably filled with things. Apparently, Kathryn Shaw’s ancestors not only didn’t care to keep good records, they also didn’t value reading very much either since they didn’t bother to take the contents of the library with them when they left.
If we live through this, she vowed, this is the first place I’m coming back to.
At that point, Robin came bounding up to join Nikolas and Sophie. He climbed up Sophie’s body and clung to her neck. She let him ride her back, drawing comfort from his presence.