witchesintheweeds_GEN Page 13

  “Can you break them?”

  Nim considered that. “I…maybe. Not the way I normally would with a stone, but maybe if I made a flat disk of magic I can cut through them at ground level.”

  Trajan’s voice was no-nonsense. “Good. How do you do your workings, words, imagery?”

  “Combination, but mostly imagery. What you said before about breathing made sense.”

  “Then envision the disk, but make it spin, like a saw blade. Don’t break them, cut through them.”

  Nim turned her head to the side so she could look at him. Her hair fell in her face. She tried to toss it back, but it slid forward again. Trajan very carefully gathered her hair in his hand and laid it on her back. Their gazes met, and something passed between them.

  Trust. He’d trusted her to hold off the spikes. And now she was trusting him enough to do what he said.

  “I didn’t mean to call those,” she whispered, still holding his piercing blue gaze. She was once more keenly aware of the fact that she was half naked, but for an entirely different reason. When Trajan looked at her, it was as if no one else existed, as if she had his entire focus.

  “What were you trying to do?”

  “Encase you in dirt.”

  Harris laughed from her other side, but it sounded forced. She turned to face him, her hair falling over that side of her face. He looked at her, then his gaze shifted to Trajan before sliding away.

  Nim’s heart started to pound.

  “Maybe you should touch me,” she said slowly, “while I try this. Both of you.”

  For a second neither of them moved, but then Trajan reached out and gathered her hair in his hands, twisting it into a rope and laying it down the center of her back. He placed his hand on her shoulder, all but his pinky finger resting on cloth. His smallest finger lay on the soft skin at the base of her neck. Harris did the same, but his touch was tentative, and he stroked her neck with the tips of all his fingers before laying his hand on her shoulder.

  She shivered when he stroked her, and once more she was highly aware of the two strong men on either side of her. It was no longer fear that pulsed through her, but desire. For both of them.

  “That is deeply fucked up,” Trajan said.

  For a horrified moment she thought she’d admitted her attraction to both of them out loud. She turned her head slightly to look at Trajan, only to see that he was staring at the stone spires, not her.

  Relief that she had kept her thoughts to herself startled a little laugh out of her, which helped dispel some of her tension. They must have thought she was laughing at his comment.

  “I’ll hold onto the tree,” Harris told her.

  “Why?”

  “If you’re going to make a magical saw blade, you might slice through some roots.”

  Trajan grunted. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “But my magic shouldn’t be able to touch the plants,” she protested. “The stones are a real, physical construct—magical, sure, but still physical, which is why they cut your vine, but I’m going to be working in pure magic.”

  “Whatever it was that we did when we combined our magic, I’m pretty sure it included somehow transferring one another a bit of each other’s power. I think that might be why we’re all using magic, touching each other, and there’s no reaction.”

  Nim hummed her agreement. “You’re right. I forgot.”

  “There’s a lot going on,” was Trajan’s dry comment.

  “Okay, here goes nothing.” Nim sent her awareness along the thick lines of magic that flowed from her hands through the earth, carried by the soil and minerals that were her elements. When she connected her awareness with the dense cylinder of magic she’d formed around the underground base of the spikes, her skin started to prickle. She’d packed tons of power into a small space. That thought sparked another.

  What had happened to all the magic she’d stored in the soil under her crops?

  That moment of distraction was all it took. The stone swords each shot up another foot. The sharp points of the tallest of them were now almost touching. Trajan made a pained noise. If he’d been standing there he would have been skewered.

  “That wouldn’t have been good,” Harris said in a bland voice.

  Ignoring them, she forced her attention back to the well of power she’d condensed against the roots of the strange not-stone spears.

  “A flat, horizontal disk,” Trajan squeezed her shoulder as he spoke. “Spinning so fast that the edge of it becomes razor-sharp, and the force is enough to cut through stone.”

  She let his words flow through her, but if she expanded the magic into a large flat disk like a saw blade, the outer cutting edge would be outside the circle of stones. Instead she imagined a tiny circle of magic, about the size of a quarter, in the small space between the innermost spires and Trajan’s still-captured boots. The rest of the magic hung down from the disk in a long, soft column that was something between a rope and a tendril of underground smoke.

  She imagined the quarter starting to spin, so fast that the earth would be hot from the friction.

  Nothing happened.

  The stone spires started to grow again as her focus shifted. The tips of the two tallest clacking together, and then fusing into one rather than breaking. The strange, fluid movement of the inner material of the stone accelerated from the lazy bubbles of a lava lamp to the roiling of boiling water.

  “No good, not good,” Harris chanted.

  There was a gust of magic-tinged wind. A fist of air slammed straight down onto the stone. Thick-skinned, thorny vines sprouted aggressively from the soil, weaving between and around the spires.

  Connected as they were, she could feel their magic, feel the foreign yet familiar tingle of energy and ozone. They were helping, because she was failing. The earth trembled as she sank an inch deeper, the soil damp and rich as it pulled her in.

  Though she didn’t need tools or words to use her earth magic, it sometimes helped. She pulled in a breath that made her nose and tongue tingle, laced as it was with Trajan’s and Harris’s magic, and said, “Ar mo mhíle dícheall.”

  The words were Irish, a language she didn’t speak, a place that was not the root of her power, but Irish immigrant practitioners had built the foundations of the world of magic in North America as it was now. The cabals had all taken their names from Irish words, and use and belief had given words spoken in that tongue a nearly universal effectiveness.

  To the utmost of my power.

  The tiny disk of magic whirled to life, spinning so fast that the thin layer of soil covering it heated, dried to dust, and blew away in Trajan’s wind, all in the course of a fraction of a second. The spinning disk started to expand, whirring to the size of a silver dollar, then a small plate. As it did, the heat turned rich, loamy soil to dust, and the wind whipped it away. She let her head fall between her arms as she concentrated.

  “Goddess.” Harris’s vines started to pull back, each carefully lifting away so they weren’t cut on the sharp edges of the not-stones. Once they were out of the way, she got a glimpse of what had put that note of reverence in his voice.

  She could physically see the whirling blade of silvery-white magic. It looked as solid as the earth or the trees, though that wasn’t possible. It was just magical construct, with no physical form.

  The widening blade hit the innermost stones, those that had been positioned to skewer Trajan though his testicles. The not-stone flashed silver, black, and then turned liquid and collapsed. The spinning blade flung the viscous liquid out in a splattering circle. Trajan and Harris both moved, flinging themselves forward and down so they protected her with their bodies.

  Harris hissed in pain, and the hand he’d kept on her shoulder clamped down.

  There was a moment’s scrambling, and wind whipped around them. “You’ve got a small burn,” Trajan reported on Harris’s injury.

  “Damn, that hurts.

  She should have been able to protect them.
Normally it would have been easy enough to coax the soil to rise up and create a wall of earth between them and the disk, but she was fully committed to destroying the stone spires. “Can’t—protect—” She panted the words.

  Either Trajan could feel that she wasn’t able to help protect them or he’d somehow inferred what the rest of her sentence would be. For a moment the wind that was pummeling the stones stopped. Then soil puffed in a circle around them, and the roar of wind muted all other sound and made her hair whip around her head.

  “We’re shielded,” Trajan said, loud enough to be heard over the wind. He’d encased them inside a tube of whipping wind, and when the next stone spires fell, molten rock flinging into the air, the wind deflected it.

  Power flowed through her in a strange, nearly endless loop—up through the earth, into her body, out through her hands where it tunneled down into the earth in a parallel path to its ascent, feeding the long ribbon of power she had connected to the underside of her saw blade.

  Her whole body started to ache from the force of the magic being pumped through it. Harris’s roots—wrapped around her hands, wrists, lower legs, and feet—were starting to pulse and burn, probably in response to her magic. There were so many sensations buffeting her that she felt like a boat in the middle of a wild, turbulent sea, unable to tell which way was up.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” she stammered. She was trying to let them know that she was at the edge of her own limits. Perhaps past her limits. She knew she’d never used this much magic at once before. She wasn’t sure she could stop the spell now even if she wanted to.

  What if she couldn’t stop the spell at all?

  Harris, hand still on her shoulder, bent low so he could look into her face. “You okay?”

  Nim nodded, then shook her head. She no longer felt like she was in control. Her magic crackled as it started cutting through the next spires. Harris looked at her working, and together they watched as stone turned liquid, fell, and was flung off into the forest.

  She sank another inch into the earth. Her arms were buried almost to her elbows. Kneeling as she had been, her lower legs and feet were entirely buried, and now the soil rose to cover several inches of her thighs.

  “You’re almost there,” Harris whispered.

  “Not. Sure. Stop.” She was able to gasp out the words. The blade bit into the final spires, severing them.

  “Well done.” Trajan squeezed her shoulder.

  The blade kept spinning. Even without Trajan’s wind to blow away the heat-and friction-dried earth, the force of the spinning was flinging dust into the air. Her magic was now a four foot diameter white disk that was still growing.

  “Nimue, you need to stop.” Trajan’s voice was calm and commanding.

  “I don’t think she can,” Harris told him.

  Nim shook her head. “Can’t. Can’t.” The words were pants. It was getting hard to breathe.

  “Pull back your magic,” Trajan ordered.

  The long rope of magic dangling from the center of the disk now seemed endless. It should have been finite—but she seemed to have tapped into some deep well of earth magic, and like water flowing though a pipe, it would keep flowing unless she shut it off.

  If only she knew how.

  Nim’s muscles were shaking and her body felt like it was on fire. The power she’d tapped was too great—she was going to shake apart, or burn up from the inside.

  Both of those were better fates than having her arms and legs amputated when the spinning disk reached her.

  “Run,” she gasped. “Run.”

  Chapter 11

  Harris dropped down to lie on his side in the dirt. Nim was now sunk so deep into the earth that there were only a few inches of space between her bare breasts and the soil. Her legs were buried to mid-thigh, her arms nearly to her elbows, and she seemed to be sinking faster and faster. He knew earth was her element, but to him it looked like she was being sucked down into quicksand.

  He cupped her cheeks, barely able to look at her face, so bright was the moonlight-white glow from her eyes. “I’m not leaving you here,” he promised her.

  “Sorry.” The word was thin. It sounded like it was getting hard for her to breathe. “Go.” She let the weight of her head fall into his hands.

  His heart clenched and his mouth went dry. “Nim, baby, stay with me.”

  She made a pained sound and he felt the wetness of tears on his thumbs. Damn it, he liked Nimue Mahkah. Really liked her. She should have been literally untouchable for him, but thanks to whatever strange bit of magic they’d manifested, he could touch her without their ambient magic sparking. That meant that maybe, just maybe, they could have had something.

  At least for a little while, until the curse took her or they were executed for breaking cabal law.

  “You think we gained a bit of each other’s power?” Trajan snapped.

  “Yes,” Harris replied without looking away from her.

  Nim exhaled, but did not inhale again. Harris’s heart stopped.

  “Nim.” He raised his head and pressed his lips to hers, breathing into her mouth.

  He felt her start and pulled back. He wasn’t sure if she’d actually needed mouth-to-mouth or if he’d just shocked her into inhaling again by kissing her. She took heavy, labored breaths. After a moment she let the weight of her head fall back into his hands.

  “She’s dying,” he snarled at Trajan.

  “Nobody’s dying today.” Trajan shucked his jacket and took his shirt off.

  Harris blinked. Okay then.

  Looked like the Scamall witch had lost his mind. Harris was trapped in what was essentially the eye of a tornado with a dying woman and a man whose response to stress was to start taking off his clothes.

  Trajan grabbed the open edge of Nimue’s dress, pulling the hem from the soil, and shoved the fabric aside, pushing it across her back so it dangled on the opposite side of her body from where he knelt.

  Her smooth, naked back was exposed from her shoulder blades, which the dress still covered, down to the top of her black cotton underwear. Harris wanted to grab the dress and flip it back over to cover her naked skin. He still felt like an ass for treating her like a thing instead of a person and suggesting Trajan touch her. He sure as hell wasn’t going to let Trajan molest her as part of whatever psychotic break the other man was having.

  “Don’t touch her.”

  Trajan raised one brow, then bent over Nimue, laying his bare chest against her naked back. He planted one hand on the dirt to support himself and the other he slid under her, in the ever narrowing space between her stomach and the ground. “I thought you said touch would help us see what she sees. If you’re right, then contact may also help us either access her power, or use our supposed new earth magic.” Trajan’s eyes started to glow blue, but there were streaks of white in the blue. The hand he had planted on the ground also started to glow, a white light emanating from under his palm, as if he were pressing a light bulb into the earth.

  “Unlike you,” Trajan continued. “My first thought isn’t a make-out session.”

  Harris ignored that barb, realizing Trajan was right. He concentrated on Nim, on the magic he could feel coursing through her. It was familiar but different, like eating a new variety of apple—identifiable as apple, but the taste subtly different from anything he’d had before.

  He closed his eyes to block out all the other elements that vied for his attention—the disco-ball dust motes and the too-white needles of the albino redwood that reflected back the sunlight. His right hand, the one that now bore a whitish skin discoloration where he’d touched Nimue, began to glow against her cheek. He still had his eyes closed, but he knew that’s what was happening from the way the light coming through the thin skin of his closed lids intensified and his palm began to tingle.

  Trajan, who had a head start and way more skin-to-skin contact with her, made a sound that was halfway between awe and horror. “She’s tapped in to the earth itself.”<
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  “She’s an earth witch,” Harris reminded him.

  “I know that, dumbass. She’s…” Trajan made a frustrated noise, as if he didn’t know what to say. “She’s pulling power up from the core of this mountain. From deep in the earth.”

  It was as if Trajan’s words allowed Harris’s mind to make sense of the information he was getting from Nimue and her magic. He saw it in his mind’s eye—a long, straight ribbon of rich, dark magic, stretching down, down into the earth. Deeper than the soil, into the rock, then through that layer into another, down, down where ancient things were buried. The magic was variegated in color, blackish brown at the deepest levels, shifting through shades of gray, deep green, sparkling gold, and burnt yellow, until finally turning white at the surface.

  The spinning saw blade of magic continued to expand, pulling on this endless well of magic. And somewhere in this long, winding trail of power was Nimue, her body and mind like a bead on the string.

  “Oh fuck,” Harris whispered.

  “So fucked,” Trajan agreed. “We have to cut the spell.”

  “Or we take her and run.” Harris, still lying on his side, kept his right hand on her face, but started to dig at the soil around her forearm with the other hand. “We’ve got to get her out.”

  His fingers brushed against something slimy and putrid. He jerked his hand back. “What the hell?”

  “No,” Trajan said firmly. “One problem at a time.”

  “There’s something wrapped around her arms.”

  “Might be a magical tether, part of the construct.”

  “No, this isn’t her magic, this is…” He dug his fingers down into the dirt a second time. He remembered a school carnival game where they had to blindly stick their hands into buckets of slimy stuff. Usually it was nothing more than cooked spaghetti coated in oil, though the parent running the game would insist that it was a bucket of live worms.

  This was like that, except it wasn’t spaghetti. It was worms. Evil worms. Harris forced himself to touch one of the fibrous, rope-like things that was wrapped around her buried forearm. If he’d been a layperson, he might have thought it was a root of some kind, but there was no telltale pulse of life in it, yet at the same time, it wasn’t inanimate. He didn’t know how else to describe it, but the undead not-root thing was evil.