To combat its effects, she placed her hands on the ground and shoved her fingertips into the moss. Her mind plunged deeper, into the earth. Because she sat only a few inches above bedrock, she encountered the slumbering power of the Earth resting just below her. The energy was massive, slick and smooth, stone-skinned, its vibration long and slow, too deep to hear with physical ears, but something that moved through her,stealing the drum’s power over her, making its magic . . . paltry. That was a good word.
Mud exhaled long and slow, and felt through the earth, finding the drummer.
Feet dancing, body swaying, the witch beat out her magic onto the afternoon air. Mud opened her eyes, looking down through the fog that filled the ravine, to the scene below her, and focused on the glen at the bottom. An oval pond was cut into the rocks, blue black water, seeming still, but rippling with speed at the same time. Not normal water. Powerful water.
She knew where she was, and she should have figured it out sooner. She was at the Rift of the Light Dragons—the interdimensional opening through which the arcenciels had fled Earth.
The dragons were gone. Nell said they had disappeared through this very rift, never to return because humans were so evil no creature from any other dimension wanted anything to do with us, except the angels and the demons. Angels rarely interacted with humans. The demons liked humans too much and interacted all the time.
In front of the rift, were the witches. And everything was wrong.
Mud had been labeled a witch herself, though her power was totally unlike regular witch energies. She was going to have to go to magic camp someday to be taught the basics, but Nell had already taught her enough to know this was not a typical witch circle. This one had been dug into the loamy soil as if with a spade and sealed with a splatter of blood. The witches were walking, dancing almost, moving around inside the circle, not sitting. They all carried athames, each of them cutting the queen, who didn’t seem to be able to stop them.
Only the drummer stood mostly in one place, at magnetic north, a position Mud could feel through the heart of themountains. She wore skirts to her ankles, long silver hair down and wet, the strands dripping from the mist. She had been drumming and dancing a long time, looking tired and worn and wet to the skin. She was neither a true black witch nor an actual blood witch, making magic with a sacrifice, like with a goat or a chicken. None of them were. The drummer was an air witch, working with other elemental witches, with various elemental powers, to form a weird magic circle, a circle banded and sealed by blood, the blood itself the one thing that made this strange circle work.
In the center of the circle of witches, was the queen. She looked like a woman would, if a lion exploded halfway out of her. She looked . . . amazing. She was also bleeding. Like, a lot. At the south position stood one of the men. He darted close and cut her. The queen screamed, the sound scratchy yet deep, guttural and high-pitched at once. The vibrations scored along Mud’s flesh and the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She had thought that was just a thing people made up, but the hairs stood right up and tingled. The man witch leaped back, his athame bloody and coated in the queen’s power.
Mud closed her eyes on the images and sank into the earth, not disturbing the sentient sleeping heart of the mountain, but stretching her thoughts around it and back toward Soulwood. She stuck one hand in her pocket and scooped the dirt into her palm. It wasn’t much, but it was her safety net. The small acreage of Soulwood she had claimed opened to her like a combination of green light and marshmallow puff, its power surrounding her, molding to her spirit.
The entirety of Nell’s farm opened to her as well, the place where Nell’s magic had first begun her transformation into a plant woman, the first plant woman in thousands of years. Mud felt Nell’s presence, and realized her sister, though she was at work as a paranormal cop, had gone back to HQ. She was sittingin the tiny patch of Soulwood soil she kept on the roof of the building where PsyLED, unit eighteen was located.
Nell appeared as a green and brown tree, its trunk and limbs shaped something like a woman, wood and leaves and gnarled roots. Mud took her hand and their power merged. Mud reached back to the rift, pulling her sister with her, and into the moss below her, down to the bottom of the chasm.
She remembered the greenbrier vine at the top of the crevasse, the thorns that had torn into Eli’s pants as he carried her. They would do.
Reaching through the soil to the branching roots, Mud found them, and traced up through the tough vines to the wicked thorns. She poured her power into the vines and roots and led them down to the bottom of the gorge, streaming power into the burrowing crawling roots and the lengthening, tangling vines. Above ground, there was an explosion of leaves and soft plant material, quickly hardening, the vines and thorns growing, vicious.
Nell’s power supplemented the growth cycle, but her sister, who was much more experienced than Mud, didn’t try to take over, which gave Mud more confidence. Her sister had faith in her and that faith created even more life and energy in Mud.
At the bottom of the chasm, she sank the roots in the deep, rich soil.
One tendril of the finer, more delicate roots of the plant squirmed in her gift, quivering and shaking, and Nell showed her how to shut it down, leaching the life out of the root there, allowing it to die.
Careful, her sister thought.We don’t need another sentient plant.
Especially a greenbrier, Mud thought back.That would give the Green Knight a run for his money.
Mud felt a tremor of amusement from her sister, so many miles away.
When dozens of strong firm roots were in place around the rift pool, Mud sent tendrils toward the surface of the ground, twining and coiling. As the greenbriers reached a fraction of an inch from the surface, she felt the vibrations of the people above, the pulsations of the drum, beating, beating. She also felt the presence of others on the cliff faces all around her. Eli, Sarah, Alex, the Consort. From farther away, others were landing at the LZ, a second helicopter, bringing reinforcements. She counted six landing on the ground, but they were all human, and human slow. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t be here in time to help.
The queen screamed again.
Mud opened her eyes.
Longfellow was hanging beside her, its reddish eyes an inch from her own. She gasped and leaned away to focus on it. The flying lizard’s body was inverted, its claws gripping the small cracks and fissures in the stone face. Its long tail snaked back along the rock wall, wings folded. “Meep?” it asked.
Mud turned to see the witches below her. The queen was on her knees. Blood was everywhere. Shock, like lightening, zigzagged through Mud.
The queen was going to die.
Now, Nell thought at her.
Leaves burst from the ground, first coiling and twirling, then whipping and reaching, growing with the magic of the earth. There were seven bunches of roots, more than Mud had realized or planned on. She concentrated on just three and pushed vines into the air. Those vines wrapped around the feet of three witches. Fast. Faster than she could follow with her eyes. Up a man’s legs. Beneath two women’s skirts. The man screamed as if he’d sat on tacks. Women shouted.
The drumbeat faltered.
A vine-wrapped woman tripped and fell across the trough marking the circle.
