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The room plunged into darkness. The trickle of the waterfall went silent. She was blind, the house eerily quiet without power running through it.
“Darien?” Loren ventured.
His hand slid across her wrist, fingers gently squeezing. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he said. “The power must’ve gone out.”
It was nearly pitch-black in here; she didn’t like it. Moonlight bled softly through the yard, and as the minutes wore on, and the power remained off, Loren’s eyes began to adjust. She saw Darien’s head turn, saw him studying something out in the yard.
“Should we get out?” Loren whispered.
Darien didn’t answer. He just kept staring out at the yard.
At the protective spells over the house, she realized. The wall of magic mortal eyes couldn’t see.
Darien was using his Sight; if she looked hard enough, Loren could see the black gleaming in his eyes.
“Darien, what—”
Water splashed, startling her, as Darien began to push her toward the edge of the pool. “The fucking spells are down.”
83
Roman’s House
YVESWICH, STATE OF KER
Roman led the way out of the shooting range, Jack and Kylar following. The house was pitch-black, so Roman was guided by nothing but memory and the Sight. Regardless that this was his home and he knew it like the back of his hand, his skin prickled with chills, and his heart beat harder than normal, the darkness threatening to swallow him whole.
He drew a deep breath in through his nose…blew it out through his mouth. He focused on the voices of Jack and Kylar bouncing through the house as they spoke to each other, willing their conversation to ground him.
They made it upstairs and into the kitchen just as Tanner, Ivy, and Shay were coming down the hall from the top floors. And thumping down the stairs after them were Paxton and Eugene, the latter tripping on the last step with an, “Oof!”
Tanner, no more than a silhouette that made Roman’s scalp prickle, said, “The spells are out.”
“It’s a blackout,” Roman said, the words tight. He was sweating. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust quicker.
“Does this happen often?” Ivy asked.
“Once in a while,” Roman said, blindly heading for the control panel set in the wall. “But they don’t usually stay out for more than a couple minutes.” And they’d better not, or he’d fall straight into a panic attack. Which meant he’d be useless if anything worse happened. He dug out his keys and found the small one shaped like a microchip. “We can usually get them back on if there’s nothing obstructing the anima mundi.”
“We call them rifts,” Kylar explained to the others as Roman slid the key into the slot at the side of the panel. “It’s when the flow of magic is severed and the threads need to be stitched back together, so to speak.”
“Fractures, you mean,” Tanner said. “Those have happened a few times in Angelthene.” Roman felt like the words were loaded, but he kept his focus on the screen that gradually came awake by battery.
“How can there be so many names for the same thing?” Jack laughed.
Roman felt the last of the blood drain from his face as he deciphered the columns of symbols on the black screen. The runes were transparent, every symbol a muted shade of gray. No white, no colors.
Tanner stepped up to his side, scanning the codes over his shoulder, his eyes as black as Roman’s. “There’s no feed,” Tanner breathed, concluding the same thing as Roman. “There’s no magic coming in at all…” Not just a rift, a fracture—something that could be mended.
There was no fucking source, no pool of magic to cast a line to.
“Roman?” Shay called. She stood by the big windows in the living room, her form silhouetted by the moonlight.
She pointed at the backyard—at the opaque wall of white fog swallowing the neighborhood.
Oh fuck.
Shay whispered, alarm choking every word, “What kind of fog is that?”
