Les Senior went as directed, and only when he was well away and into the arms of others did I get to my feet and put my hands on Carrie’s shoulders. “My turn.”
“We need you out there. Fighting.”
“I need to know what I’m fighting. I’ve got to See what’s at the heart of this thing. And you just came a hair’s breadth from a coronary. You don’t need to be shouldering this burden right now. So move it.”
I got the dirtiest look in Creation, but bit by bit Carrie transferred the weight of shielding she’d taken on to me. The power fluctuating between the eight compass points strengthened considerably as I took more of it on. Partly because I was a heavyweight in the mojo department, but partly because this transition was deliberate, rather than somebody shoving themselves in to plug a bursting dyke. After about two minutes, Carrie stepped out, and I...
...stepped up.
Because I wasn’t kidding anybody, least of all myself. I had a pretty goddamned good idea who, or at least what, was behind the pit of Nothing trying to eat out the heart of my homeland. Barely three days ago I’d effectively nailed a cross to my enemy’s door, made it clear we were about to reach a header. I’d seen him for the first time, the Master whose power was death and corruption, and I’d come damned close to losing my life.
I had lost my mother, forever and for always, to the fight against him. She’d come to protect me one last time, and had burned out everything she’d ever been, in that battle. There were old souls and new ones in this world, and my mother’s had been old, but it would never be reborn. That was the price she’d chosen to pay to keep me alive. It had given me the last bits of breathing room I needed, because it had turned out I wasn’t quite ready to face him after all. She’d left him wounded and embarrassed, and there was no chance the mess in Carolina was coincidence, not after that.
So I wasn’t screwing around when I joined the power circle. I didn’t let them have it all at once, because I’d noticed an alarming tendency for blown-out electrical grids and other exciting ramifications of announcing my psychic presence in a grand slam. But I came to the party to play, and by the time Carrie’s power faded out and mine replaced it, I was feeling pretty white-hot with magic. If there was any chance I could snuff out the Nothing, I was going to take it right now.
I expected resistance. I expected it to seep inside me and find my fear again. I expected it to ratchet that up to eleven, and for grim determination and a whole lot of stubbornness to get me through. I was prepared for that, leaning forward a little, saying, “C’mon, I can take it,” with my body language. I thought I could take it, now that I was ready for it. The fear hadn’t been as bad as the Master hitting me in the teeth with pain, and I’d survived that. Only just, but this wasn’t the time to quibble over details. So I was braced, ready for whatever the Nothing threw at me.
I was not prepared for sympathetic magic to skyrocket across the power circle, south to north, and catch me in the breastbone. Catch me right where my magic had lodged itself for all the long months before I’d really accepted it, in fact. Not my heart: my center. I wasn’t prepared for its vainglorious brilliance, four shades of brightness that whipped and blended together so fast they became white. And I was really not prepared for the boom of power that erupted when that magic and my own fused.
A visible ring bounced through the power circle like a shock wave, vibrating the mountain under our feet. Vibrating the air, vibrating sound, vibrating everything: I could’ve been standing under the bells at Notre Dame and gotten less resonance.
The gasp couldn’t have been audible, not beneath all the power noise, but it felt audible. Everyone took a step forward, a step closer together, like we were drawn in by that power burst. Part of my brain screamed an objection, not wanting to get any closer to the Nothing than it had to, but it wasn’t the part in control. I moved just like everyone else.
The Nothing shrank. Rolled in on itself, no farther than we’d stepped forward, but it got just a little bit smaller. Emotion spiked through the power circle, hope and confusion and flaring confidence. We stepped forward again, magic ricocheting between me and the southern point like some kind of earthbound display of Northern Lights. My power sluiced along the outsides of the other adept’s magic, encompassing it with silver and blue. The four bands of bright colors spun inside mine, and everybody else’s swam alongside ours, drawn back and forth at light speeds. From inside I could See the different auras, though only faintly: mostly they remained blended to brilliance, subsuming themselves to the massive working of white magic. We all took one more step forward, coming much closer to the Nothing, and a sense of nervous anticipation swept through the working. Six of them were waiting: waiting to see what the southern and northern compass points to their circle did next.
I wasn’t sure voices would carry through the Nothing between us. I clenched my stomach, preparing myself for a fight, and sent that feeling of determination through the magic.
It bounced back at me so fast it felt like laughter. A grin stretched across my face, wild and a little crazy. I spread my arms, knowing I was much too far away to catch the hands of the elders nearest me, but feeling like it was a statement: Come and get me. Catch me if you can. The same feeling crashed back at me from the other side of the circle, all kinds of reckless and foolhardy and ready for a fight. I knew the feeling intimately. I’d been like that as a kid. Who was I kidding: most of the time I was still like that. I hadn’t been set on the warrior’s path just because there was a big bad monster who needed taking out. I was sort of an aggressive little punk most of the time. Mouthy and full of ’tude, even—or especially—when it wasn’t warranted.
God knew I had plenty to introspect over, but even I thought this was sort of a weird time for it to crop up. I told myself it was the familiarity of emotion in my partner’s magic, and let it go. There were far more important things to worry about right now.
Like how to crush the Nothing into a tiny ball of, er, nothing. We had some kind of major power blend going on here, far stronger than I’d anticipated. Stronger than the Master had anticipated, too, I was willing to bet. But I didn’t know if the Nothing could be undone, or only captured. Wondering made my head hurt, so I took action instead of thinking anymore, and squeezed my shields down.
The first couple advances we’d made had been instinctive. This was deliberate, and there was a world of difference. The Nothing made a sound, a shriek of anger that reverberated in my ear bones. It collapsed in, shrinking visibly as the southern adept squeezed, too, and as the others followed our lead.
Glee rose up from my counterpart. Glee and triumph and all sorts of other premature but obvious emotions that I was inclined to share. I’d had a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I deserved one easy win, especially if it made my homecoming a little easier. But I wasn’t quite foolish enough to do a touchdown dance yet. Shriveling evil magic was not the same as eliminating evil magic, and I wanted it good and eliminated. My shields were rock-solid, and I wrapped them in the idea of a net, just to help squish everything down a little more. Step by step we closed in around the Nothing, and with every step the others became more confident. It made a positive feedback loop, creating stronger magic because our belief in it was stronger. I had no idea how much time passed before I touched hands with my right neighbor, and then moments later with my left, but suddenly we were a physical construct as well as a magical one, and the Nothing roiled and shrieked and spat fury in the circle created by our linked hands.