Under Witch Aura (Moon Shadow Series) (36 page)

He was playing with her.
Instead of us
continuing toward the cliff, we danced closer to the sand painting
again.

Claire flung both arms
wide. “Jack!”
She clenched her claws and screamed, “Call! Call a power that
will destroy my enemies!”

“You can't capture wind.
You're
deluding yourself,” White Feather said.

Her next gust spun our
bubble to the
left and blasted dust right through the barrier. Tara coughed. I
ducked my head against the debris, and finally realized White
Feather's goal.

Distracted by her own
tantrum, she
wielded power carelessly. Sand and dirt stirred with her every
attempt, blurring the charcoal lines near her feet. The very sand
that denoted the edge of the painting was wearing thin.

A howl split the air from
the trail
head. “Bringing in the troops!” I almost didn’t
recognize Lynx’s voice because it morphed to another wicked
howl at the end. The noise was echoed by none other than the little
house cat.

The caterwauling was enough
distraction
to allow White Feather to position us directly in front of Claire. He
dropped the bubble to let Lynx inside.

Claire expected it. Like a
scorpion
with prey, she pounced. Her wind tore a path from the ground at her
feet to ours. The black line that had blocked the east was
obliterated. The east side, the side where good spirits could enter,
was now open.

I spat dirt. Lynx dove,
hitting the
ground and rolling. His arms protected the tiny house cat.

White Feather snapped the
bubble back
in place.

Jack either didn't notice
the missing
line or didn't realize its significance. He began the chant.

I ignored Jack’s chant,
opting to
use the time to study the pile of rags he chanted over. Were they
bones? Sarah?

There seemed to be too
many, but they
were badly charred. If the bones were Sarah, that meant Jack and
Claire had two witches already in the painting. The horses were
meant for another witch, and they had also come after me and White
Feather.

Just how many witches did
they need?
Theoretically, more witches meant more practice, more power, but for
a pair that hadn't even managed to harness the first wind demon
properly, they were operating a few ingredients short of a spell if
they believed they could summon and control other powers.

Time for defense. In the
relative
safety of White Feather’s circle, I released Tara’s hand
and unrolled the leather sand painting. My hand was unsteady as I
finished sketching the power lines with the charcoal pencil.

“Your mom is on the way up
the
trail, bringing backup,” Lynx whispered. “She said your
dad was ready to light the world on fire and to expect him any
second.”

Since we didn’t know how to
stop
Jack, them arriving might only mean more witnesses to die. My puny
painting was set to call the powers of the east, but would they
answer?

I drew the final line.

“OhmyGod!” Tara yelled.

For a heartbeat, then two,
the wind
attacking our dome cut off. I jerked up to confront empty silence.
From under my feet, thunder roiled. The turquoise on my wrist cracked
across the middle.

Whatever was arriving was
no friend of
earth.

Jack
let loose a
primal scream.

“Holy--” White Feather
never finished.

Jack had completed his
chant. Maybe no
one would answer my painting, but a putrid green fog had answered
his.

It hit Jack first, perhaps
because his
chanting was the call or maybe because he was closest to the
obliterated sand lines. The fog had no trouble leaving the painting
to reach him.

The green mist wrapped
soundlessly
around his belly. He doubled over. “Claaaaaaire!!!”

Claire stood as if
paralyzed, only her
lips moving. “Tastes...” She stretched in his direction.
Her mandibles chewed, her fingers clenched.

The skin on Jack’s face
sagged
suddenly, aging him forty years in a matter of seconds. He decayed,
withering like a dried out tree. His belly bloated, but the skin on
his face stretched and dripped to the ground.

“Is it trying to get in? Or
out?”
I had to shout to be heard above the still rumbling earth.

“Both,” White Feather
yelled back.

A thin wisp of green smoke
floated free
of Jack.

Slowly at first, then
swiftly, it
struck at him like the tail of a scorpion.

“What the hell
is
it?”
Lynx shouted.

“Age? Old age?” My voice
croaked with fear and dust. Claire had demanded he call something to
destroy her enemies. Her passionate request had been fueled by
desperation and rage. She was inside the painting. If old age had
heard her call, it would certainly destroy
any
enemy.

As the chanter, Jack should
have been
safe, but the lines on the sand painting had been partially
destroyed. He was fodder. His skin dried and then sucked taut.
There was nothing left but a full tuft of hair oddly attached to a
skull.

Tara screamed, “It’s coming
here!”

Indeed, the snake-like wisp
rose from
his bones and drifted closer.

I grounded, but it did no
good.

White Feather blasted at
the oncoming
wisp with his wind.

The undulating mass split.
One piece
wafted underneath White Feather’s breeze.

He compensated, but I
gasped, clutching
my stomach as the truth hit home. “Hunger! He called hunger!”
The s
tomach pains were
not as
dangerous as the wave of weakness that followed. “
Sickness
.” I knew the last one, the only
one I had guessed correctly. “Old
age.”

“
Hang
on!” White Feather thrust it back again, but it had touched us.
It knew our scent. Or perhaps I should say,
she
knew
our scent.

Claire shrieked with
laughter,
slobbering as she chewed, eating up every bit of energy. As the focus
of the painting, she benefited from our hunger, sickness and old age.
She was feeding through the beast.

Hunger
grabbed,
doubling me over with pain.

Claire opened her mouth
wide. “Food!”

White Feather muttered,
“You
didn’t own me then and you don’t own me now.” The
wind kept the hunger at bay, but only when he pushed at it. Every
time he reined his wind in, hunger struck with a vengeance.

Lynx growled. When he bared
his teeth,
they were those of the bobcat. In hunger, he was our enemy.

Tara reached out to him
either in
sympathy or in pain. When she touched him his face shifted back. He
was left panting, but the stress on his body and face was gone.

He straightened, staring at
her
unblinking.

“Healer,” I gasped out.
What I had sensed in her was real; she had a natural ability to heal.
Such an affinity provided her some immunity.

White Feather’s wind
receded, and
I fell to my knees. Claire was learning. He pulsed his power, but
when she guessed the timing, the results were deadly.

“Tara, grab our hands!” As
a healer, she had some natural protection against the ravages of
hunger, disease and aging. Healing was the polar opposite of disease,
and a negating force against starvation. Healing could slow some of
the effects of old age.

Pain hit again before she
responded,
but Lynx was no dummy. He knew magic and whether he completely
understood it or not, he wasn’t about to waste it.

Lynx, still grasping her
hand, dragged
her to me before the next wave passed. Tara clutched my weak fingers.
The aging didn’t fade immediately, but the hunger pains abated.
I wrapped my fingers around White Feather’s hand.

He shut his wind inside
himself,
depriving Claire.

“You are miiine! I am
wind!!!”
She
threw herself at the
pile of
bones, the bones that had probably once been Sarah.

How far gone did you have
to be to
wallow in bones?

Grabbing up pieces of the
dead, she ran
to Martin. There was no method to her madness. She dumped them on top
of him and returned for more.

Martin whimpered. “I
need...”

I felt his call to Mother
Earth.

“Martin, no!” As a
sacrifice, any link he provided would only strengthen Claire.

Claire snatched up Jack’s
bones.

“Martin, hang on! Just hang
on.”
None of us could help him from here.

The little house cat didn’t
agree. It darted from behind Lynx and scampered to Martin. It was
too small to do more than scatter the bones and grab one of the
smallest.

Claire gave a howl that was
worthy of
the cat, but she didn’t slow in her intent. She didn’t
care that one was missing. She just added more.

Sarah’s
bones had already opened the west once before. When Claire dumped her
next armload on top of Martin, Mother Earth
cracked.

My heart stopped.

I fell flat on my face, not
knowing
whether to ground or stop grounding. The silver at my wrist
flickered. All sound ceased for me as a jagged line ripped across the
ground.

“Adriel!” White Feather
grabbed my arms and shook me. “Adriel, breathe!”

It was nearly impossible to
force a
breath, and I wasn’t sure it mattered. Behind White Feather, a
deadly tunnel of screaming wind and smoking sulfur snaked up from the
crack in the ground.

Before I could warn him, a
blast scattered us like leaves.
There was no holding on
to
anyone.

Wind lifted me straight up
and then
smashed me back down with equal force. I hit the dirt, slapped flat,
but still moving. “Aaaagh!” I scraped painfully across
the dirt and sand, right across my insignificant attempt at a sand
painting. Lacquered into place or not, it was now destroyed.

Well, the thing had to be
scattered by
dusk, and my flying butt had done a good job of it. I was all about
following magical rules. I should have put a sacred feather in my
back pocket to do the job right.

If the protective gods from
the east
weren’t already insulted, I had likely sealed the deal.

Claire screamed, “Bring
them!”
She flung her arm, believing she was in control, but instead of
attacking White Feather, the faceless wind focused on her. She may
have loosed a snippet of this beast at Sarah's, but that had been a
mere imp compared to the hell she had freed now.

The sand painting was meant
to contain
the forces that she summoned, but Claire had ignored the rules all
along. The tail of the funnel swirled. The strange cloud at the top
split into two eye-like funnels spinning in opposite directions.
There was no mouth, but the thing devoured Claire in a single crush.
If the chitin was supposed to protect her, it was so much debris;
there one second and splintered the next.

She did not satiate the
beast, not even
close.

“White
Feather!” I screamed. He was the logical place for it to head
next.

An arm of the beast, a
small dirt
devil, started on the west side of the painting, probing along the
crack in Mother Earth. It danced for a few moments, but there was
nothing of interest there. Instead of exploring the perimeter, the
dirt devil died.

The larger force, fed from
the crack,
paused. The eyes separated further, rolling up, down and sideways as
it studied this new environment.

The next dirt devil
appeared near the
ground at White Feather’s feet.

It swirled, sniffing him
out.

His barrier held. There was
an obvious
lack of air between White Feather and the little storm, a window
where the force hit, but bounced.

Whether it was his need for
air, or the
greater power of the attacking tornado, his hair and clothes suddenly
tangled. A tunnel of wind the diameter of a large tree trunk slapped
his barrier hard enough to fracture the surface into a maze of
webbing. Slivers of wind as sharp as blades squeezed through the
cracks. His raised arms were suddenly bloodied by hundreds of tiny
cuts.

“White
Feather!” I sprinted against the storm while fumbling to find
the last piece of heliotrope in my pack.

He fell sideways, fighting.
The air
behind him was sucked into the maelstrom through him. The beast was
calling back its own and would not stop until every bit of air was
drained from this world.

“Your
wind,”
I yelled. “Push it into the heliotrope!” I wasn’t
sure what I'd do with it, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t
hear me. Even if he had, such a tiny stone was no match for the power
before us.

The tail of a breeze lashed
onto me so
quickly, I never saw it coming. Like a snake, it wrapped around me,
grinding me face-first into the dirt.

My hands clutched Mother
Earth, but
scraped only sand and a soft mass of sticky tangled fibers as I was
dragged to the gaping crack that split the ground.

My feet were already over
the edge when
White Feather intervened. “Hold on!”

The pulse of his wind, a
giant hand,
squeezed into the turbulence.
I
held
on with my silver, grounding like I had never grounded before. I was
a heartbeat through Mother Earth, just another piece of her.

White Feather, flat on the
ground
himself, fed the swirl above our heads. He lunged for me.

I stretched.

The wind sucked me back.

His essence touched my
fingertips.

The tornado stole
everything White
Feather directed at me.

A unexpected screech of
incredible
power distracted the beast for a scant moment. It was a mother's
call, one that tore through time and space. “Adriel!” There was a flash
of flame, but it was too far away to feel the heat.