Sir Myron Rollins had always prided himself on being a man who got things done. He’d built his career doing what other, lesser mages claimed to be impossible. But while many did not agree with his methods, Myron had always found that no one complained after the battle was won. Today would be no different. Emily could call him a traitor all she liked, but when this was over, the world would know him as the Merlin who saved humanity from the spirits.
Starting with Algonquin herself.
Clutching Emily’s head under his arm, Myron smiled one last time at the Lady of the Lakes and stepped into the circle. The moment he crossed the silver line, the loops of carefully arranged metal ribbon that had once been Emily Jackson’s body lit up like phosphorus, filling even the inky dark of the Pit with blinding light. There was so much power, simply stepping into the circle should have burned out every mage in a ten-mile radius—including him—for months, possibly forever.
As always, though, Emily protected him. So long as he held on to the general’s head, the spellwork Raven had carved inside it all those years ago shielded him as it had once shielded Emily’s humanity from the relentless onslaught of spirit-level magic. But unlike his former partner, Myron was no mere pilot. He was a mage, the best alive, and his name now replaced Raven’s at the spellwork’s crux. With it, the blinding magic was his to control, to press and beat and mold like clay into the form he’d caught a glimpse of in the blood pool back in Reclamation land. The shape that, as he formed it, he realized he could now see mirrored beneath him.
It was a marvelous thing to witness a new spirit’s birth. Normally, human eyes couldn’t see magic the way spirits, dragons, or even magical animals could. With so much power in his hands, though, Myron didn’t need to see. He couldfeelthe DFZ spreading out below him like a bottomless pit.
Like most modern mages, Myron had spent years studying the Spirits of the Land. He’d even bound a few in an attempt to learn how their magic functioned. But while every spirit’s structure was famously and frustratingly unique, the one characteristic they all shared was that they were measurable. The magic contained in the spirit of a lake or a mountain always mirrored their physical forms. Animal spirits were trickier since you were working with the combined volume of an animal population’s magical potential rather than landmasses, but the general idea was the same. When it came to the magic of land and animal spirits, what you saw was what you got.
The spirit he stood on now was something else entirely.
It was unfathomably massive. How massive, he couldn’t yet say, but the record-breaking mass of magic he’d crammed into Emily’s circle barely registered beside it. Whatever was below him, it was far,farbigger than the city that had spawned it. Bigger than the Lady of the Great Lakes. Bigger than any spirit he’d encountered before. It was almost too big to comprehend, and to his amazement, it was already nearly full.
As he stood in the backwash of so much power, all Myron could think was that at least this solved the riddle of why the DFZ’s ambient magic was always so much higher than the rest of the world’s. It was sitting onthis, a magical vein deeper and richer than all the spirits around it combined. He wasn’t sure yet how much of that was the product of the Algonquin’s magic-siphoning efforts in Reclamation Land and how much was the natural result of humans attaching their hopes to the city, but wherever its power had come from, the nascent spirit was on the cusp. It stirred as he watched, throwing off a mess of emotions every bit as wild, violent, and desperate as the city that had created it. One more drop, and it would wake completely.
Fortunately, a drop was what he had. Next to the thing below, the magic contained in Raven’s Construct—the combined power of dozens of spirits, more magic than any human had ever gathered in one circle—was nothing, not even a percent, but it was enough. When Myron let the power go, it hit the sleeping spirit like a catalyst, spidering down through the seemingly bottomless magic like lightning. It was still going when an alarm began to sound from the phone in Myron’s pocket.
A smile spread over his face. He didn’t even have to bring up his AR to know what the alarm was for. It was the sensors at his New York lab, the ones he’d rigged to monitor the deep magic. Two weeks ago, that same alarm had tipped him off to Marci Novalli. This time, Myron knew it was ringing forhim. Down below, the enormous magic was coalescing into a form. It was still chaotic, but within that chaos, structure was emerging, and structure meant rules. Rules Myron now set out to enforce as he took hold of Emily’s spellwork and pushed his magic through it, closing the silver circle like a noose at the exact moment the newborn spirit breached the physical world for the first time.
Even though he’d worked out all the theory himself, seeing it in action was still miraculous. In the middle of his circle, magic was being forced into solid form before his eyes. It rippled and shifted several times before finally stabilizing into the shape of a person. An emaciated young woman wearing a long-sleeved black hoodie, black leggings, and sneakers.
Aside from her thinness, she looked shockingly normal. Even her clothes were remarkably nondescript, super generic, one-size-fits-all throwaways they sold in vending machines. She was the sort of person you saw everywhere in the DFZ, one of the millions of hungry, possibly homeless, definitely impoverished hopefuls who filled the Underground in droves. If he didn’t know what she was, Myron could have walked past her on the street without so much as noticing, which he supposed was the point. In a city this big, anyone could disappear into the crowd. Looking unremarkable was a good defense in the DFZ, and defense was clearly what the spirit wanted given the fear rolling off her in waves as she looked around at the silver prison Myron had made.
What is this?Her voice was a panicked gasp in his mind. She pressed against the glowing wall cast by the spellwork next, beating on the barrier when it wouldn’t let her through.Let me go!
“No,” Myron said, gripping Emily’s head, and the mastery it granted, firmly in his hands. “Allow me to explain what is happening. You are the spirit of the DFZ.”
She spun around, looking at him in wonder through round eyes that glowed the same orange as the city streetlights.That’s my name!
“It is,” he said smugly. “And I know it. I am Sir Myron Rollins, and now, by your name and this circle, you are bound to me.”
The spirit recoiled.No,she said, shaking her head.I am free. I—
“You are a dangerous spirit born of humanity’s chaos, ambition, and greed,” he said over her. “It is my duty as a mage to chain you for all of our protection. I will not be a cruel master, but I will not tolerate disobedience. Is this understood?”
No!she cried again, her thin lips curling in hate.I have no master. I am the DFZ. I am freedom! I—
Myron yanked on the magic running through the spellwork that bore his name, and a collar appeared around the spirit’s throat. It was made from the same silver metal ribbon as the rest of the circle, but unlike the spellwork on the ground, these ribbons followed the movements of Myron’s hand as he gripped down, squeezing the spirit in a binding as hard and unforgiving as steel.
“Is this understood?” he repeated as she fell to her knees.
The DFZ fought him frantically. She hissed and bared her teeth, scraping her bony fingers frantically at the noose around her neck. Powerful as she was, though, she was also new. A baby, uncertain of her strength and terrified of the pain Myron was inflicting. It was terribly unfair, but ruthlessness was the only edge he had over a power so much greater than himself. If he was going to make this work, he had to be in control, so he ignored her pain and dug in deeper, binding the spirit until she was gasping at his feet. He’d almost cut her magic in half before she finally gave in, her head dropping in a limp nod as she finally acknowledged his control.
“Excellent,” Myron said, easing up just a fraction. “Now, take me where I need to go.”
The DFZ looked up from the ground in confusion.Where you need to go?
“The Merlin Gate.”
When that failed to elicit an immediate reaction, he yanked the spirit to her knees. “I know you know where it is. Unlike Marci Novalli’s premature horror, you were born of fully formed magic. You should know instinctively how to find the Heart of the World. Take me there now, or suffer again.”
The ultimatum was a gamble. Myron knew better than to let his doubt show, but the truth was he’d only read mentions of the Heart of the World in stories. From what he could gather, it seemed to be some kind of Merlin headquarters, a safe haven built into the deep magic of the world. He knew it was real thanks to Algonquin, but the actual mechanics of getting there and entering the gate were complete guesswork. Marci Novalli’s cat hadn’t known anything, but he was hardly representative. His entire existence was a mistake, a premature Mortal Spirit born of death and the spillover from Algonquin’s attempts to raise this one, but the DFZ was different. She’d been born properly, and since the Heart of the World was located in the spirit’s side of things, and every Merlin had a Mortal Spirit by definition, it only made sense that she would be the key.
At least, that was Myron’s hope. A hope that paid off when, after several seconds of confused staring followed by defiant glaring, the DFZ turned around and began to dig.
It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. Hunched on the ground like a gremlin, the spirit attacked the silt-covered road with her bony fingers, flinging the dirt over her head and onto her back. But though she was moving an impressive amount of material, the hole beneath her never seemed to get any deeper. Instead, the DFZ herself began to change, her shape twisting beneath the piled, sludgy dirt of the Pit until she didn’t even look human anymore. She looked like a rat. Not a normal rat, either, but one of the giant, magically awakened sewer rats that infested the pipes of old Detroit. The ones that ate large dogs and small children.
