Chelsie shrugged. “Amelia is the Planeswalker.Ifshe was injured, she would never be stupid enough to remain on this plane, so I see no reason to waste my extremely limited time looking for her until after the current crisis is resolved.”
That was some excellent logic if your goal was to avoid Bethesda’s orders. Terrible for everything else, of course, but Julius had the sneaking suspicion that his sister did this kind of mental side-stepping a lot. Not that he had a problem with that.
“Sounds great to me,” he said, yanking open the pick-up’s rusty door. “Shall we go? We’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in.”
Chelsie was in the car before he finished, settling into the passenger seat with her legs crossed and her sword resting on the dash like she was being chauffeured. Still scowling, Marci got in next, grabbing her bag from the back where Julius had set it and moving it to her lap. Ghost hopped out a second later, jumping up to sit under the windshield like he couldn’t wait to go on a trip. If Chelsie was surprised to see the spirit, though, she hid it perfectly, watching with her unnerving, all-seeing gaze as Julius climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the screwdriver, starting the engine for what would hopefullynotbe their final journey.
Chapter 15
They arrived at 8 Mile Road an hour before sunset.
As the official northern border of the DFZ, 8 Mile was the farthest you could get from the skyways and still be inside Algonquin’s domain. But where the other DFZ borders came with a buildup of businesses servicing state-side customers looking to jump the border just long enough to take advantage of the DFZ’s anything-goes vice laws, up here, there was nothing. Just grass, the rotting foundations of strip malls, and the perfectly straight skeleton of a road that hadn’t been used in decades.
“It’s kind of surreal,” Marci said, turning around to look back at the skyways rising like a double-layered reef behind them. “All this empty space not ten miles from downtown.”
“With good reason,” Julius said, covering his nose with his hand as he opened the door. “This magic’s even thicker than the stuff at your old place.”
That was a drastic understatement. Marci’s apartment at the hoarded cat house had been bad, but the magic here was like nothing Julius had ever experienced. Normally he had to focus to pick up on ambient magic, and even then it was only by smell. Now, he could actuallyfeelthe magic like a physical pressure on his skin. The only thing that even came close was the Pit where they’d faced Bixby last month. But while 8 Mile magic didn’t reek of death like the Pit had, it still made him nervous, prickling the back of his neck like he was being hunted.
“That’s because we are,” Chelsie said when he mentioned it, glaring at the landscape like it had insulted her. “The magic here is too thick for what you’d normally find this far from the Reclamation Land border. It could just be backlash from Justin kicking the anthill, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” She climbed out of the truck, stepping into the tall grass silently as a cat. “I’m going to have a look around. Keep your nose sharp.”
Julius nodded, but his sister was already walking away at a speed that would have been a run for a human. A few seconds later, she vanished into the long shadow of an abandoned car. There was no flash, no portal, not even a blip in the pea-soup magic. The moment she stepped into the shadow, she was simply gone, leaving only the empty grass swaying in the evening breeze.
“Wow,” Marci said. “What is she, Heartstriker Batman?”
“Close enough,” Julius said, looking down the road at the line of abandoned gas stations, strip malls, and fast food joints. Or, at least, those were his best guesses. After sixty years of neglect, it was getting hard to tell what any of the crumbling buildings had been, especially since nature seemed to be working overtime to take the ruins back.
Everywhere his eyes fell, plants were growing. Huge tufts of grass had cracked the old parking lots and sidewalks into a lattice-work, while trees and bushes grew out windows and doors, exploding out of the old buildings wherever the sunlight touched. If it wasn’t for the creepy magic hanging over everything like an anvil in a cartoon, the view would have been peaceful in a return-to-nature, post-apocalyptic sort of way. With the magic, the lovely, overgrown ruins only served as a reminder of whose land this was, and how unwelcome they were in it.
Julius turned away with a shudder, holding out his hand to help Marci out of the middle seat. “Come on. Let’s get set up.”
“Way ahead of you,” she said, placing a brand new can of spell-ready spray paint into his offered hand.
He looked at it in confusion. “What’s this for?”
“We’re drawing a circle big enough to trap a fjord,” Marci explained, pulling two more cans out of her bag. “We’re going to need a lot of coverage. You take that can and paint a line on the ground going left until it runs out. I’ll go right and do the same. Once both cans are empty, we’ll come back, get two more, and do it again going north and south to form a cross. Once we’ve got our guide lines, we’ll just connect the four ends in a roughly circular fashion. Just make sure you arc out so we don’t end up with a diamond.”
“That doesn’t sound very accurate.”
Marci shrugged. “We’re talking about free-handing a casting circle big enough to hold the yearly magical output of the entire DFZ. A few bumps are unavoidable. Just do your best to get it round-ish and I’ll adjust at the end.”
Julius still wasn’t sure, but this was Marci’s area of expertise, so he took his can and got going, laying down a line of glittering silver paint over the tall grass behind him.
***
Marci’s circle ended up being nearly a quarter mile in diameter. It took them almost the entire hour just to draw the thing, which left Marci barely fifteen minutes to frantically write out the spellwork as the sun sank toward the horizon.
Julius tried his best to give her space, but as the minutes ticked down to the wire, he found himself edging closer until he was standing almost on top of her, nervously watching as she set down what he hoped were the last lines of the spell on the edge of the giant circle where it crossed one of the few remaining unbroken sections of sidewalk.
“Almost there,” she said, sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth in concentration as she dragged the chalk across the dirty cement so fast, the dust flew up like a cloud. “Just need to add in a protection so everything stays in place and…done!” She sat up with a grin. “What do you think?”
“It’s definitely big enough,” Julius said, looking down the silver spray-painted line that ran glittering off into the distance. “But isn’t it a little noticeable?”
“Only because I haven’t activated it yet,” she said. “Observe.”
Marci leaned over and placed her hands on the spray-painted line. The moment her skin touched the paint, the scent of her magic cut through the syrup-thick power in the air, and then the whole circle lit up. For a heartbeat, it flared like burning phosphorus, and then the silver spray-painted line vanished without a trace.
“How did you do that?” Julius said, leaning down to poke at the now completely normal looking grass that had been covered in paint only seconds before.
