Smoke and Mirrors (21 page)

There were a number of police, media, and quite a few Others in the fringe of onlookers pointing, staring, and taking pictures of the deep divots in the grass. Footprints. Claw marks. He’d recognize the tracks anywhere, as if the bitter, acrid scent of Viper in his true form weren’t hint enough.

Where most would have had to elbow their way in, Cormac had no trouble finding a spot that gave him a clear view of the scene. He cut through the crowd like a shark ghosting through a school of fish, making his way to the leading edge so he could get an unobstructed view. People instinctively parted before him, rushing out of his path even if they weren’t sure why, sensing the beast under the veneer.

His contact, a young changeling like Rieva, was one of those onlookers near the front staring at the growing media circus. As soon as the boy noticed him, he bowed his head deep in subservience to Cormac, then struggled to elbow his way through the crowd to get closer. As he was disguised in the form of a preteen boy, he had to weave and duck around the adults milling around him chattering about the “monster” that had taken off with the girl.

It wasn’t hard to imagine why so many people had turned out to investigate. Vampires and werewolves and magi may have captured the imagination of the general public, but many other varieties of Others had chosen to keep their existence secret. Not only for the fear and panic they might cause, as Viper had done, but because it was unwise to alert the local magi to their presence.

It took a few minutes before the boy reached the empty space the humans had left around Cormac at the front of the police barricade. He ducked his head and shoulders a few times in an attempt at the acceptable bow to use when in the presence of mundanes, keeping his eyes on Cormac’s face for any clues as to how he should proceed. He kept his voice low, leaning in as much as he dared to relay what he knew.

“My lord, I am so sorry, I had no way of stopping it. The wyvern shifted right here in the meadow and took off with her to the east. I lost sight of them once they cleared the trees.”

If Viper managed to bind Kimberly before Cormac could stop him, he would rip the blasted serpent’s wings off and feed them to him, piece by piece. He voiced a soft hiss between clenched teeth before speaking.

“Go to Rieva. Tell her what has happened. And get word about this to Eleanor Reed at The Circle.”

The boy’s eyes widened, but he nodded and took off, having a great deal more difficulty finding a way through the crowd than Cormac had. He wasn’t gifted with the aura of a predator yet; that would come when he was older.

Once the young changeling was gone, Cormac scanned the area with every sense, magical and mundane. He noted the placement of the three-clawed footprints and the slighter indentation where one had obviously pressed Kimberly to the ground before clenching about her. The ley lines showed signs of a deep pull on their energy where the wyvern must have shifted. It left behind an incorporeal trail, only visible by using his Sight, showing him a ghostly afterimage of the change and where it had taken off.

Underlying the damage to the line was a faint glimmer of something bearing the taint of magework. A tiny runic stone, still active and glowing like a tiny white star in the sea of roiling earth and wind magic stirred up by Viper’s presence. The stone was meant to protect the bearer against basic magical attacks.

He focused sharply on the location of the rune, dropping his Sight so he could see beyond the heavy shimmer of tempestuous energy overlaying the entire area. One of the cops was pawing through a purse on the ground, searching for ID, no doubt. The frayed straps and faded material had to be Kimberly’s. The stone with the rune would be inside.

Ducking around the police barricades, Cormac stalked forward. The policewoman looked up, her budding anger and harsh command to get back behind the line dying on her lips the moment she got a good look at him. Some of the other nearby cops swung around, but they, too, were struck with a sudden unexplainable terror that rooted them in place and sent a few scrambling away from the scene. People around the edges of the barricades were edging back, pushing into the people behind them, setting off a new wave of fear.

Ignoring the frantic mortals all around him, Cormac knelt by the purse, placing a hand on it as the policewoman crab-walked away as fast as she could, never taking her eyes off him. He drew on the power of the ley lines surrounding him, calling on wind and earth and spirit to tell him where the owner was now. As Kimberly’s possession, it was an extension of her—something he could use to focus his spell on a particular target. An intangible connection that he committed to memory for future use, even as he flung his power outward to do what he did best. Hunt.

The first wave searched, a formless circle that would echo back her location if she was anywhere within a hundred mile radius.

As he set his anger aside to concentrate on finding his target, the predatory aura he’d been exuding was also reined in. The police began edging closer. One of them tried to get his attention.

“Sir? Sir, you need to get back behind the barricade.”

He ignored them.

A solitary ping in his consciousness turned his focus to the east, and slightly north. Somewhere across the Sound. He sent a more concentrated wave, seeking an exact location.

“Sir. Get back. I’m not going to ask again.”

Cormac growled, low, soft, and sent a great many of those nearest to him stumbling backwards in efforts to escape the formless dread growing root in the pits of their stomachs.

Another ping. She was over water, skimming the coast of Long Island. Viper had to be taking her to his lair in the Pine Barrens.

Cormac’s growl deepened, the tone going from barely audible to bone-rattling in seconds as his form shifted and grew. People surged away as his great bulk appeared, his own talons digging far deeper furrows in the earth than Viper’s. A tremor pulsed through the ground as he settled onto four legs. Though he retained enough presence of mind to keep from stepping on any of the tiny creatures frantically moving around his feet, he only took enough time to orient himself before trumpeting a challenge to his adversary.

The force of his roar sent people to the ground, many of them mid-stride in their mad dashes to escape him, falling to their knees and clutching their ears. The earth trembled. Trees shivered. Distantly, car alarms rang and glass shattered.

Once the sound died down, a fresh wave of panic sent the crowd of onlookers and many of the cops fleeing. Only a couple of the reporters rushed off, most of them screaming into their mics and pointing cameras his way.

He didn’t care. In moments, he was spreading wings nearly triple the span of Viper’s, powerful hind legs launching his serpentine frame into the air. Trees bent, cameras and police equipment scattered, and people fell, flattened on the ground in the wake of his flapping wings, trenches deep enough to lay bodies left behind by his curved talons.

All the while, his focus was on nothing but the sense of Kimberly’s presence, growing closer with every beat of his wings. He was not a creature given to put much stock in faith or prayer, but he silently prayed that he was not too late, that Viper would not succeed in binding her before he could reach them. That she was safe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kimberly had spent the first ten or fifteen minutes of her first flight terrified to the core of her being, too scared to move. Viper had her clutched close to his chest, legs tucked tight to his body for flight. What parts of her weren’t pressed to his hot, scaly body were freezing and her eyes kept watering from the wind stream. When she managed to turn her head enough to look over her shoulder, all she caught behind whipping strands of her hair was a body of water that must have been the Long Island Sound and a slice of the western coast of the island far below them.

There was no comfortable position in the wyvern’s claws. Held prone, she had nothing to support her head or neck, and bony ridges around his claws dug into her back, legs, and sides. Cold and terror made her body quake with spasmodic tremors, her blood an icy sludge in her veins. Her arms weren’t pinned, but her fingers had long since gone numb locked around the curve of one of his talons. While the razor points weren’t slicing into her clothes or skin, she could barely breathe for how tightly he held her.

That might have been a good thing considering they were flying at a height and speed that would leave her nothing but a red smear on the ground should he drop her.

It took less than an hour, but to her, time crawled like a snail hurtling headlong through frozen molasses. When he made an abrupt shift in course, tilting at a sickening angle as he turned inland, she nearly spilled her lunch. They cut over a slice of beach and then a harbor. She spotted what looked like hundreds of boats out for a day on the water, white hulls winking in the sun, and some of the tiny figures far below pointing up at them. Then they flew beyond it and over a great deal of greenery spotted with houses. Some of the properties even had pools, which was an extravagance she had heard of but never seen before. Her whole apartment probably could have fit in some of those houses several times over. Any wonder she might have felt at seeing homes that looked like things she’d only seen in magazines and movies before was brutally dampened by the icy wind and her cramped muscles.

Soon there were no more buildings. Just acre upon acre of trees, dotted by the occasional clear patches of fields and ponds.

She’d never seen this part of Long Island before and was totally lost as to where they might be. She’d never ventured any farther than Queens or Brooklyn and hadn’t realized that there was this much untamed wilderness so close to home. Even if she managed to escape once they landed, she had no idea how to get back to the city from wherever it was he was taking her.

Then she noticed he was losing altitude. Fast.

She could have sworn some of those treetops were skimming her dangling feet as he took her over a heavily forested area. Heart lodged in her throat, blocking the building scream straining to escape her lungs, she closed her eyes tight, not wanting to see what came next. Moments later, every bone in her body rattled and she gave a breathless yelp as the wyvern jolted to a hopping, one-legged stop, stirring up great gouts of leaves, pollen, and dandelion fluff in his wake.

Birdsong halted mid-note. Brush rattled as larger animals fled, smaller ones hunkering down in hopes of going overlooked. The world went quiet and still, holding its collective breath as the great serpent in their midst settled to earth.

Kimberly slowly opened one eye to peek and see where they were, then the other, her jaw going slack.

They were somewhere deep in a wooded area. There were no signs of a trail, buildings, people or cars, visible or audible anywhere through the ring of scrubby trees surrounding the small field Viper had chosen for his landing. Not even a whisper of distant cars honking or voices. It was obvious “scream all you want, no one will hear you” territory.

Using the hooked fingers on the wrist joint of his wings, Viper pulled himself forward, keeping his back arched and Kimberly clutched tight to his underbelly with one clawed paw. She could have reached down to brush her fingers over the waist-high huckleberry, catbrier and brambles, and the scent of pitch pine was chokingly thick, even with the wyvern’s musky scent clogging her nostrils.

She sneezed. Then again. Viper paused, lifting his right wing to peer back at her. She tilted her head to stare back at him with watering eyes.

Giving a disgusted snort, he pressed on, slipping between the trees with surprising grace despite his great size and encumbrance.

It wasn’t long before he arrived at a point of ley line convergence so strong, it started her muscles involuntarily twitching and made every hair on her body rise. The trees had grown in strangely here, arching unnaturally to provide cover from any watchers from above. There were deliberately placed stones, stacks of containers of spelling ingredients, and a deep, wyvern-shaped depression off to one side. He dropped her near the outer edge of this strange haven, his claws flexing open so suddenly that she couldn’t catch herself. Her numbed fingers slipped and she came to a painful landing on her ass onto a thin cushion of dead leaves and pine needles over hard-packed, sandy soil.

He slithered around, watching her with narrowed golden eyes as she scrambled back, crab-walking on her hands and feet to get as far from him as she could. Then brained herself on the wall of the circle he had summoned to trap her.

A fresh wave of panic surged through her as she looked down. At her feet was a point of a large pentagram drawn in ashes over a patch of sand that had been cleared of dead leaves, along with several symbols that were all too familiar. The same symbols she had been working on in class with Xander in preparation for drawing her own binding circle. All this one had needed was familiar material to be set in the center. Her.

When he had closed the circle around her, she was effectively trapped until he banished it. She had no way of breaking it from inside. Even if she smudged the carefully drawn symbols, he’d already activated their power. Though she knew some planar beings succeeded at turning the tables on their summoner, she had no clue how they did it and no idea how to reverse the process Viper had set into motion. At this point, the only question was how long she could hold out before his will overtook her own, binding her to him.