“Can you describe it?” she asked, looking down again before she got sick.
There was a long pause as Ghost searched for the words. “It’s bulging,” he said at last. “Like something’s trying to push through.”
“You mean like I pushed out of my death?”
“No,” he said, his cold voice worried. “This comes from the outside, like a mountain growing down.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain.”
“That’s okay,” Amelia said, cowering in the crook of Marci’s neck. “I think we’re about to find out.”
Even without looking, Marci knew the dragon was right. Just like when she’d felt it pushing on Ghost’s winds before, she could feel the magic expanding now, bulging like an over-inflated balloon as the chaos above them started to groan.
***
Back in the DFZ, Myron’s task was nearly complete.
He’d spent the entire morning taking Emily Jackson apart piece by piece. Under any other circumstances, the disassembly of a system as complex as Raven’s Construct would have been the work of weeks, but Sir Myron had been the governing architect of the Phoenix’s spellwork matrix for the last five years running. He’d taken her apart countless times before, and today, with no quality control office watching over his shoulder or deconstruction paperwork to fill out, he’d done it in record time.
The longest part had been physically pulling out the almost quarter mile of spellworked metal ribbon that controlled the regulation of her magic and arranging it back into a proper casting circle, the result of which was now sitting on the bed of a military transport truck under the watchful eyes of Algonquin’s corporate mages.
Myron himself was seated in the truck’s cab, squeezed uncomfortably between two armed soldiers dressed in the navy-blue body armor of Algonquin Corp’s Anti-Dragon Taskforce. It wasn’t the guards who made him uncomfortable, though. As thede factohead of magic for the UN, Myron was used to riding in armed convoys, and no mage worth the name was afraid of guns. But it was quite upsetting to sit between two fellow humans who didn’t bat an eye over the fact that he had a woman’s headcradled in his lap.
This was his least favorite part of working on Emily. He wasn’t sure if it was security concerns or the spirit’s macabre flare for the dramatic that had inspired Raven to hardwire his construct’s buffer matrix to the inside of her reinforced skull, but its presence meant that no matter what they did to the rest of her, Emily’s head always remained disturbingly intact. Even worse, her eyes stayed open, glaring at him accusingly. Normally, Myron liked to tie something over them to prevent this exact scenario, but there’d been no time. The moment he’d finished hauling out her spellwork and getting the metal into the right shape, Algonquin had ordered everyone into the trucks. They’d been driving ever since, pushing farther into the bowels of the DFZ Underground than he’d ever been until they reached a place so dark and deep, it didn’t even show up on the GPS.
“Where are we?” Myron asked as the truck rolled to a stop.
The guard beside him grabbed the door handle with a grim look. “Old Grosse Point.”
Old Grosse Point was what the maps called it, but like anyone else familiar with the thousands of films, TV shows, games, and books set in the DFZ sprawl, Myron knew the buried suburb where Algonquin’s wave had first crashed down by its colloquial name: the Pit.
It looked just as it did in the movies, too. The Skyways above them held up some of the most expensive real estate in the DFZ, but down here, it was all just black. Black above, where not even a crack of daylight broke through the grime-stained underbelly of the Skyways. Black below, where the streets and houses were still covered in a foot-thick layer of silt from the flood. Even the horizon was black thanks to the cement wall Algonquin had built between this section of the Underground and her lake, cutting it off from the air and sun like the stone seal on a tomb.
The oppressive darkness was more than enough to justify calling this place a pit, but it wasn’t until the guards opened the doors, breaking the truck’s protective ward, that Myron realized just how fitting the name truly was. One breath of the deathly, oily, oppressive magic that filled the air here was all it took to make him feel as if he really had fallen into one of the colder, dirtier hells.
“A warning would have been appreciated,” he said angrily, activating the labyrinth of spellwork woven into the lining of his coat to bring up his personal ward. “This is a class-five magical pollutant zone.”
The soldier shrugged as though exposing the world’s premier mage to potentially toxic ambient magic was no big deal and put on his helmet, activating his own ward with a button before offering Myron his hand. “This way, sir. Lady Algonquin is waiting for you.”
Tucking Emily’s head under his arm, Myron allowed the soldier to help him down the three-foot drop to the ground. The oily reek of polluted magic only got worse when he landed, his leather shoes sinking up to their laces into the slimy layer of old lake mud covering what had once been a road. Myron pried his feet free with a muttered curse, cinching his ward tight as he made his way through the muck toward his hostess.
The Lady of the Lakes was harder to spot than she should have been. This was partially because of the Pit’s magic. Even with the truck’s headlights at his back, Myron couldn’t see more than a few feet down the ruined street before the shadows took it back, the thick magic diffusing the light like murky water. Mostly, though, it was because of the Leviathan.
Just like when he’d loomed over them in Reclamation Land, the giant monster was semitransparent, his shadowy body blending into the Pit’s black miasma. The only reason Myron knew he was, in fact, looking at the Leviathan and not some trick of the dark was because the monster was holding Algonquin suspended ten feet up in the air on a pillar of black tentacles.
As always when she was forced to be around her human troops, the Lady of the Lakes was in her public form: an old Native American woman with a wise, wrinkled face and a thick braid of silver hair that went all the way down to the belt of her navy pants suit. From the way bits of her clothes kept rippling and changing, though, it was clearly a minimum effort. One that collapsed completely when she spotted Myron.
“Right on time,” she said, her human face dissolving as the Leviathan lowered her to the ground. “Is it ready?”
Rather than state the obvious, Myron just pointed at the truck, where a team of Algonquin’s corporate mages was levitating the silver casting circle that had once been Emily Jackson off the flatbed.
Algonquin’s water rippled in happiness, and then she whipped her water down at the street between them. “Place it here.”
With an irritated breath, Myron nodded, turning to walk back through the mud toward the mages to oversee the relocation.
Even with his help and the hover spell, moving the circle was hair-raising work. Since Algonquin had refused to tell him where they were going, Myron had been forced to fill the circle ahead of time, loading it up with the spirits’ magic before they’d left Reclamation Land. Moving a full circle was never a good idea, but he’d thought he could get away with it thanks to Emily’s enormous capacity. But while the ride over had been uneventful, now that they were at the final stage, Myron was starting to realize just how grossly he’d underestimated the amount of magic Algonquin had squeezed out of the spirits who’d sacrificed themselves to her cause. Even rearranged into a circle—a much more efficient shape than a human body—Emily’s spellwork was barely able to hold all the magic Algonquin had forced it to absorb, leaving it packed like a spring-loaded snake-in-a-can. One wrong move, and the whole thing would blow up in their faces. But while that was par for the course for most of Myron’s projects, it didn’t make him any less anxious as he helped the corp mages float the loaded circle off the truck and down the silted road.
Finally, after what felt like years, everything was in place. Myron was on his knees, making the final adjustments, when he felt water drip onto his neck. When he looked up, Algonquin was looming over him with his own face.
“This had better work, mage,” she whispered, glaring down at him with his own exacting scowl. “I’ll spill dragon blood all day for the joy of it, but the sacrifices of my brothers and sisters must be honored.”
