I tore off part of my sandwich and handed it to Ringo, who bounced up and down until it was clutched in his paws. “Don’t jinx it.” I reached for my first cup of coffee, then my visionblurred, making me queasy. Suddenly it felt like the whole room was shifting. “Oh no.”
“Oh not this again,” Sebastian spat, though I couldn’t see him now in the abrupt darkness after the shift.
Gone was the scent of old wood and open air of the sitting room, replaced by stone and a hint of mildew. I gripped my sandwich hard enough to drop a glob of cream cheese and sprouts onto the ground, then winced as stars burst to life before us, forming into the shape of the guardian.
“Could you not just speak to us up there?” Sebastian huffed.
“Shh,” I warned, approaching the guardian. The scrabble of claws followed by something climbing up my jeans let me know Ringo had been brought along too, and it was hard to miss Gabriel dutifully blocking me from the human form made of stars.
The shimmering creature seemed to hone in on me. “You have brought the blade, but you have also brought the void. I do not understand. Why have you come here?”
I cleared my throat, placing a hand on Gabriel’s arm as I stepped around him. Out of all of us, I was probably the only one whodidn’tneed protecting from the guardian. It was hard to tell exactly where to look since the face didn’t actually have features, but I leveled my gaze somewhere around where the eyes should have been. “We’ve come to regrow the pathway, like I promised. Can you tell us where the old one used to be?”
The guardian’s stars flurried about erratically. “The void does not grow. The void takes.”
Did she mean the vortex? Come to think of it, I was feeling a bit of that strange buzzing I’d experienced when we faced my grandfather. “We’re not here to take anything,” I soothed.
I lifted one hand to placate her, but as I did, some of the stars pulled free from her form and floated toward my hand.
“Lies!” Magic buzzed through the room, the guardian’s stars flashing blindingly bright.
Gabriel pulled me back as I lifted both hands to ward her off, but the movement made more of her stars pull free to float toward me. “Stop! I’m not trying to hurt you!”
The buzzing intensified, the guardian coming apart at the seams. Where her stars touched my skin they burned like dry ice, but the ones near my hands seemed to sink through my skin.
Gabriel grunted, and I realized the stars buzzing around us were burning him too. Sebastian hissed as the stars sizzled through his clothing. With a growl, he gripped both my arms from behind, then pointed my hands at the main bulk of the stars.
They came toward me like I was a magnet, and with my hands held out, I absorbed them. More and more of them raced toward us, some burning, but most sinking into me.
It all ended as abruptly as it had started, leaving us in complete darkness as the final star hit my palm. My labored breath was loud in the sudden quiet. “What the hells just happened?”
Sebastian released his grip on my arms, allowing me to lower my hands. “The vortex just saved us, that’s what.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat, straining to see, though it was impossible in the small stone space. My skin still stung where the stars had touched me. “I’m pretty sure it also made her attack us.”
Sebastian gripped me again, just one arm this time. “Let’s get out of here.”
Gabriel said nothing, but I felt him grip my other arm.
“Ringo?” I said, my stomach dropping. He was a lot smaller than us. If too many of those stars hit him…
“He’s inside my jacket,” Gabriel said. “He’s fine.”
Relief washed through me, but only for a second as my mind flashed back over the guardian’s panic. I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but she had sensed the vortex. Maybe she understood that it had been linked to the gray that had invaded her waypoint.
Maybe the vortex sinking into me wasn’t such a harmless thing after all.
8
My magic brought us to Mistral and Crispin, who were standing before a massive spiraling tree. Its twisted branches reached up so high above the other foliage, I couldn’t see the end of them. Beyond the height, I could see why they had chosen the tree. It stood out from all the others, the bark more silvery and the pattern so intricate it hardly seemed real.
Mistral and Crispin turned toward us, eyes wide. We must have looked crazy all windswept and star-burned.
Mistral came forward to grip my arms while Sebastian explained what had happened. Though he watched me, Mistral’s eyes grew more concerned with Sebastian’s every word.
“This isn’t good,” Crispin said. “Your intent should have been enough to control it.”
“I didn’t mean to do it!” I blurted. “But she freaked out and she was burning us. I just wanted to make it stop.”
