“Not the first time I’ve saved your ass,” Adrian spoke tersely, piercing Luke with his blistering aqua-gold stare. “Someday you should try thanking all the people you owe your life to, rather than just pissing them off. Come on. Let’s move.”
It was a scathing condemnation, and as Layla watched Luke’s rage spark all over again that Adrian had been an asshole, Adrian ignored it, moving up the stone stairs that corkscrewed up the old well. With a glance at Layla, Dusk pushed from the wall. Layla followed Adrian with Dusk behind her, choosing her way carefully as they ascended the moss-slick steps.
Ice and snow coated the old stone beneath the dying winter light, and as they arrived above-ground in a thick copse of barren alder trees, they stepped out from a crumbling well carved with dragons and arcane runes. All around lay the ruins of a town, mounds of broken stone walls and foundations spectral in the wan afternoon. Storm clouds were heavy above, beginning to shed a thick fall of snow. Layla realized they were on the hilltop of Chartres, much further north than Chambord and an impossible distance to travel by foot so quickly.
But the Thin Ways had gotten them here in haste, and as Layla glanced to the brooding sky, she estimated it was barely noon. Glancing left, she saw an open space surrounded by trees and dead grass. In a cruciform, the space was exactly where the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres lay in the human world, and as Dusk led them along a snowy path towards the ruined cathedral’s footprint, Layla breathed deep to be out of the Thin Ways. She couldn’t quite shake the terror of it, though, and as she thought about the danger they’d just come out of, she suddenly saw six pairs of red eyes rise in her mind.
But though they were terrifying, they held little power now that they were trapped beneath the earth. All the same, Layla knew what they could have done to her, and glancing at Adrian, she saw the seriousness of his face as they moved into the second phase of their plans. They’d come through one danger, only to be thrust deeply into another.
Another which was entirely unknown, as they moved in to face the White Chalice.
CHAPTER 22 – CHARTRES
Standing inside the footprint of Notre Dame de Chartres in the Twilight Realm, Layla watched snow swirl down as the storm thickened. All around, the cruciform area of dead grasses and winter-barren trees was becoming lost to humped mounds of white, though the infamous Chartres labyrinth they stood upon was strangely untouched by snow. The ancient emblem was pitted and worn beneath their feet, its white stone set in the classic rose design just like in the human world. But as Layla looked out over the ruined town, she saw nothing of foundations that should have been the cathedral itself.
As if the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres had simply vanished.
It had been twenty minutes that Luke had been walking the labyrinth, trying to feel for the barrier that kept the cathedral hidden in the Nexus-realm. Twenty minutes that he’d tried to open hisnullax, and still nothing was happening. But as Luke turned another bend, Adrian suddenly gave a growl where he waited with Layla and the rest, throwing up a hand in exasperation.
“Luke, are you even trying to open your magic?” Adrian called out, as Layla hugged herself to keep warm in the settling snow.
“Show me how it’s done, Adrian, and I’ll fucking do it!” Luke snarled back as his green eyes pinned Adrian, vibrant and pissed. They stared at each other for a moment, and Layla felt a surge of energy rush between them – though it was only Luke’s regular Storm Dragon energy, rather than hisnullaxwhich responded to Adrian’s irate whirl of hot winds.
“This is useless.” Adrian growled, turning away from Luke and lacing his hands over his head, staring off at the trees. Luke was similarly disheartened and furious about it as he left the labyrinth, walking over to where everyone waited at the edge.
“Luke,” Dusk spoke calmly as he blew on his hands, the cold dropping quickly as a wind picked up. “What triggered yournullaxin the tub when you helped Layla? Can you recall?”
“I don’t know,” Luke spoke as he curried a hand through his hair to flick off snow, then drew his parka’s hood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. Everyone was huddling in their coats as the temperature dropped fast, even Rhennic and Rikyava. The storm-front Queen Justine and her people had manifested all the way from Chambord was a furious one, and as the wind whipped snow hard through the dead town, Luke’s gaze settled to Layla’s. In his devastated green eyes, she saw all the pain he wouldn’t show the others – that he was failing to rescue their friends.
“You do know,” Dusk spoke gently as he watched Luke. “Tell me what happened when you saw Layla in the bath, what you felt.”
“Magic is mostly intuition, Luke,” Rikyava spoke as she moved closer to Luke, watching him with her strong lavender gaze. “Somewhere inside below your conscious mind, you know why your Dragon rose the way it did to help Layla. Take a breath. Don’t think, just relive it. Feel your way back into the moment, and the answer will come.”
“I just…” Luke took a deep breath, closing his eyes as he seemed to go quiet deep inside. “When Adrian told me what was going on, I had this rush of alarm. And when I got to the bathroom and saw her – blue in the tub, like the kind of hypothermia you don’t survive – I panicked that I was going to lose her. I felt this enormous white electricity surge up inside me. Dusk helped me breathe so it wouldn’t swamp me, but the start of it was when I took one look at Layla’s face and saw she was drowning… in something that I couldn’t heal any other way.”
“Healing. Of course.” Layla blinked, suddenly understanding the problem. “Luke, the first time your magic rose was when mine bit you – it was trying to heal your body. The second time, you used it to try to heal me. The third time, when Queen Justine bit you, it was trying to heal you also, though it was backed by extreme rage that time. Don’t you see? You’re a healer. It’s not just that medicine is important to you – it’s that your magic tries to heal people.”
“My god.” Dusk spoke, and Layla saw a plan spark suddenly in his eyes. “Luke. Go stand at the center of the labyrinth. Forget walking it, just stand in the middle.”
“Ok.” Luke gave him a confused glance, but walked back over the worn stone to the center. With a beckon from Dusk, Layla and the others followed, standing inside the labyrinth’s boundary, though not in the very center like Luke. “Now what?”
“Close your eyes. Picture your friends in your mind.” Dusk intoned in the low, soothing voice people used for hypnotism. As he spoke, Layla felt a slow, strange harmonic moving out from Dusk through the stone of the labyrinth, straight to Luke. Luke closed his eyes, taking a deep breath though his hands were still tucked deep in his pockets. Layla saw his entire body shiver from Dusk’s rumbles, then relax as he stood taller.
“Picture Charlie, Celia, and Arron,” Dusk continued in that low singsong, “all their smiling faces so happy on a summer day in Seattle. Now see them here in a cold cathedral in the Twilight Realm, scared, taken by predators and not knowing what their fate will be.”
Layla saw Luke’s body tense. She saw him take a swift breath, his dark eyebrows knitting as if he was suddenly in pain, or furious.
Dusk saw it too, continuing. “See your friends, far down in a black dungeon. Feel them in the deeps, shivering with fear, not knowing if anyone is coming to rescue them. Feel them afraid, cowering against the iron bars of a cold, cruel cell. And then a creature comes for them. A Vampire Revenant with tendrils of black ice and eyes of red flame.”
Luke hissed at the center of the labyrinth. Layla’s adrenaline spiked as she felt a crackle of electricity spring to life all around Luke. With an outstretched hand, Rhennic eased Layla and the rest back as he watched Luke warily. At the center of the labyrinth, Luke was breathing hard, a seething fury on his face as his hands came out of his pockets – ready.
“Feel the creature come for them.” Dusk continued, watching Luke knowingly. “Feel it like ice in your soul as it touches them, as it starts to drain and feed. Feel their fear as its magic touches them; their terror that nothing will ever be right in the world again.”
Luke was trembling now, but not from cold – from power. Shivering with a hard magic surging through him in crackling waves, hisnullaxnimbus began to take shape around his body. Forming a ring of white mist, it flowed like ghastly water around him despite the rushing wind. As Layla watched, that deadly mist thickened in currents and eddies like a river of death, blistering with bursts of electricity.
“Feel the Revenant,” Dusk continued, his gaze sharpening hard on Luke as his hypnotizing rumbles surged through the stone. “Taste its magic as it takes your friends. Taste that pure cold from which nothing escapes; only dies. They are dying, Luke. Your friends are dying and only you can save them. Their bodies are cast through with the darkest power, eating them like a cancer and making them feel nothing but terror and death. But you can save them. You can heal them. Take your fist now. Take your fist and ready your power. Take your fist – and slam it into the barrier that keeps them from you!!”
As Dusk roared out his final command in a wave of earthshaking magic, Luke gave a horrible roar of his own. Strangled, it was the sound of a thousand beasts in torment as Luke suddenly balled both hands into fists and slammed them down – straight into the stone at the center of the labyrinth. With a deafening retort, the labyrinth cracked in a spiderweb from his impact, shattering to a thirty-foot radius as Luke’s whitenullaxthrust into the stone and flooded like a rageful sea beneath their feet. But it did not touch Layla or the others, only flowed out fast all around them – slamming into a shimmering boundary at the edge of the clearing’s cruciform in a burst of color and light.
