I fought to open my eyes, my lashes gummed together. I opened them a slit, intensely grateful that I could see through the tangled lashes and the tears. My hands were curled up near my face and the skin was weeping, blistered, and stinging. I blinked and looked around. I was in the hallway outside of the break room and T. Laine was sitting on the floor beside me. “It’s okay,” she said. “The fire’s out. The kid’s out. We’re safe.”
I was gasping, hyperventilating, and I knew it but I couldn’t stop. T. Laine’s face was creased with worry; Soul stood in the break room, standing guard over Devin, looking angry and guilty. And worried. And in shock. At herself? At something else? I had a fleeting thought that her emotions were turned inward and had little to do with what had just happened to me. Then that thought slid away with the pain.
“How?” I whispered, and my voice croaked.
“I keep my null weapons charged and on me at all times,” she said. “Remember?”
As the unit’s resident witch, T. Laine had the tools to stop most magical attacks and the ability to use them. “My hero,” I whispered, straining to see into the break room.
The tile where I had been kneeling was smoldering, wisps of smoke still rising. I touched my head and encountered hair, happy it hadn’t been singed. My face hurt and I touchedmy cheeks. They were burned, blistered, the pain more than I could define. “Ohhh. Oh, oh, oh,” I whispered, blinking. And then I remembered what she had said:The kid’s out. Null spells didn’t knock people out. “You didn’t hit him, did you?” My voice sounded less husky, but it hurt to talk.
Lainie smiled crookedly. “Just with a sleep spell. He isn’t human, but he reacts to magic like one. Can I help?” She nodded to my hands and held up an amulet. “Healing. It’ll take the pain out. Or it should. Now that you’re growing leaves, I can’t guarantee anything.”
I stared at the amulet. It was a small moonstone wrapped in verdigris-stained copper. I wiped my nose with my wrist and gasped at the bolt of pain that ricocheted through me. “We could try. Probably should try. But I’d rather stick my hands in Soulwood dirt.”
Her smile went more crooked and her expression was both worried and compassionate. My face must be more burned than I thought. It must be bad to make T. Laine try so hard to hide her distress. “We figured you’d say that, so Tandy’s bringing all your plants in from your window boxes.” Having a job to do was important to the empath when someone was feeling strong emotion. He must be suffering my misery almost as much as I was.
JoJo stepped from her cubicle and knelt beside me, holding a bottle of chilled water. I shook my head. “I’m cold,” I managed. “Room-temp water, please?”
She switched it out and placed a blanket over me just as the shivers hit. I think I might have blacked out because someone touched my shoulder and I woke with a start that shocked pain through me like being tased. In the background I could hear cats snarling and screaming, Soul shouting, and maybe the sound of wind chimes, all cut off abruptly. My body stank of fire and pain, and... and I smelled rosemary. My eyes were stuck together again, but I got them open and focused blearily on the plants all around me. Without thought, I shoved my burned hands into the soil of two pots andreachedfor Soulwood.
It was here at my fingertips and yet so far away. I pulledhard on the soil and the life in the plants. Instantly, the soil and the plants were desiccated, dead. I yanked my hands out of the pots and rammed them into two other pots. And then two more. Dropping into the soil and calling on Soulwood, so far away, the land sleeping the sleep of winter. It was dark there, shadowed and cold beneath the sleet that fell again. Two sets of pots later, and many dead plants around me, I felt a change.
In the darks on the horizon, a pale light came awake, deep and deep anddeepin the earth. Stretching, curious, seeking me. And we... came together. Soulwood wrapped itself around me. The pain eased away.
The healing was the yellow of warm sun after an icy dream, the coolness of a mountain spring spilling down rocks, the touch of velvet moss along bare skin. It was the scent of pine in winter and the feel of roots reaching and spreading, seeking nutrients and water, and sharing life with me. I sighed and the breath didn’t hurt. I realized it had been painful to breathe only when the pain vanished.
The pain in my face and hands flowed away with my breath, like water flowed down a hill, and deep into the earth of Soulwood. Deep and deep and peacefully deep, around rock, broken and splintered, through layers of rounded stone from some ancient riverbed. Home. I was home. The pain fled and faded and failed, waning like the moon. Peace. Healing. Soulwood.
I don’t know how long I was there, but I knew the instant when Brother Ephraim awoke. I felt him stretch and twist and grumble. I focused on the place he had carved out of my home. It was as blackened as always, a place of death, of drought, of forest fire, but it coiled with scarlet snakes full of the poison of hatred and fury, and despite the absence of life as I knew it, despite the death layered atop death, it had life of its own—a life of twisted and bitter evil, sparking and sparkling and electric.
Ephraim stared at me, his charged hatred snapping like whips, hissing like snakes, but he didn’t move. There was something about that snapping heat and antilife that seemed important, something I needed to guard against. But beforeI figured it out, lightning struck at me, through the ground, through the deeps. Black light blasting at me.
I raised a wall between us, pulling on Soulwood. But the lightning was faster. It struck me, midchest. Midbrain. A blinding electric heat/light, boiling, roasting, tearing into me like the child of lightning and laser. I went blind, slammed away from my body, far, far, andfar. Everything went black.
•••
Minutes... hours... passed. I struggled awake, fighting the lethargy, the lifelessness, the penetrating and powerful fatigue. I was underground. I was... not in Soulwood.
I reached out, trying to find it. But I was lost, deep underground. Worse, I was blind. Disoriented. I flailed, trying to find up and down, trying to find my land. I called to it, but it didn’t answer.
Had Ephraim killed my land? Had he killed me, then stripped my soul away and tucked it into a pocket, like the pocket he had made for himself? I struggled harder, panic filling me.
Then I heard... something. I stopped. Holding my panic still. Forced calm into my spirit, breathing, though there was no air, resting though I had no body to calm.Okay,I thought.Okay.
“Neeeellll?” The voice was too slow, too distant. “Neeeellll?” it called again.
This time I found where it came from and angled my consciousness toward it.
“Neeell?”
I raced toward it, through the darkness, through the impossible distance, straining, struggling. Fearing I was losing parts of myself to the expanse of darkness. Struggling on nonetheless.
“Nell. Please come back.” T. Laine’s voice, calling me with her witch magic.
There. It wasthere. I slung my mind, my spirit, my very soul at the voice.
Back to headquarters where my body lay. And up into the soil of the potted plants.
