She was so focused on him she almost forgot to watch for the place where she had felt the shift until they had almost stepped over it.
"Wait!" she said, grabbing his arm. "We"re here."
The hall looked the same in both directions. Nikolas frowned. "I can"t sense it."
"Maybe this one is a smaller shift, and you"ll be able to sense a bigger one," she said. She frowned. "How are we going to measure what happens on either side of a shift? We can see the hall clearly-just like we can see the house from outside-but there will be a difference once we step to the other side."
"I think one of us needs to step over, while the other stays on this side," Nikolas told her. "Then we each count to ten. We can practice how fast we count so that we"re keeping the same time. The first one who hit ten reaches for the other one. Since clocks don"t work, it"s not going to be an exact measurement, but it will give us an idea of what to expect."
"Okay, let"s try it."
They practiced the beat of the count a few times, then Nikolas told her, "See you on the other side."
He stepped over the shift, and she started to count. When she hit seven, he reached for her hand and stepped to her side again. "That is so strange," she muttered.
"What number did you hit?" he asked.
"Seven, and we couldn"t have been counting that far off from each other. So this means down the hall that way, time flows faster than it does over here and in the great hall." Kneeling, she opened her pack and pulled out a small can of white paint and a brush. "They didn"t get colors."
"I don"t think they understood what you wanted."
She gave him a sidelong grin. "Doesn"t matter. We can just number the zones."
Nikolas pulled out a pad of paper and sketched as she painted a line across the hall, then to one side by the wall, she painted 7:10. "The seven is on this side of the shift. The colon is the shift itself, and the ten is on the other side. Make sense?"
He nodded. "It does." He pointed down the hall. "One thing-we don"t want to number that zone. We might go all the way around the house and come at this hall from the other side. If we label that "zone two" right now and keep numbering zones as we find the shifts, this area might end up getting labeled "zone nine" on the other side. To avoid confusion, I think the only zone we can label right now is the great hall."
"I hadn"t thought of that." She sat back on her heels. "So the only things we should map right now are the floor plan and the shifts. We can label everything afterward."
"Right." He squatted beside her, leaned forward, and gave her a quick, hard kiss.
Hey. That wasn"t playing by any of the rules either one of them had set up. She scowled, disturbed, maybe a little angry, and maybe more than a little delighted. "Stop that."
"I need to hear you say it." Nikolas"s dark eyes were intense, heated, and far too close for her comfort. "Say, "Nikolas, I want you to stop that.""
He wanted to hear the truth or falsehood in what she said. "No. I"m not going to play your games."
"I"m not playing any games, remember?"
Tears p.r.i.c.ked at the back of her eyes. Turning her face away, she stood as she asked, "Then what the h.e.l.l are you doing?"
"I can"t leave you alone. I don"t want to." He rose to stand beside her, still too close. "I heard the lie in your voice when you said last night was the last night."
"Screw you, Nik." She gave him a look filled with bitter hurt. "I heard the truth in yours, when you said as soon as you got me out of your system, you"re gone."
His expression changed. As he reached out to her, a low rumbling noise started and rose in volume until Sophie could feel it vibrating through her feet.
Dread bolted through her. "What is that? It sounds like an earthquake."
"It"s Morgan," Nikolas snarled. "He"s calling up the land magic."
They raced back to the great hall and the front window, where the rest of the men had gathered, their expressions grim. Slowly the rumble died away. Nikolas shouldered his way to the window. There were too many men in the way for Sophie to follow him, so she climbed on the hood of the Mini to look out.
The low rumble began and rose in intensity. Rubbing a clear spot on the dirty window to peer through, she saw Morgan kneeling on the lawn, hands flattened, his pose similar to the one Nikolas had used when he had buried the Hounds. Morgan"s head and shoulders were bowed, and even from that distance, she could see the strain in his body. Behind him, a tree toppled over and crashed into the roof of the cottage.
Rage and fear hit in equal measures. "He"s destroying my property!"
Nikolas said harshly, "This must be how he broke the crossover pa.s.sageways. He"s using land magic to try to break through to the house. Can he do it?"
She sank both hands into the hair at her temples and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to think. Could Morgan do it? This piece of land wasn"t in alignment with that piece of land. Like Nikolas"s morningstar, any kind of missile wouldn"t make a direct hit.
But this wasn"t a missile. This was a kind of magic she had never encountered before, and if Nikolas could call upon the land magic to bury thirty Hounds, what could Morgan do?
Somehow he could call upon the land magic Powerfully enough to break entire crossover pa.s.sageways.
Opening her eyes again, she confronted nine sets of eyes watching her intently. Reluctantly she told them, "He doesn"t carry Djinn magic, so he might not be able to get inside the house, but he might be able to bury the house with us in it."
Chapter Nineteen.
Nikolas"s eyes narrowed. "But the house isn"t entirely in his dimension, right?"
"If his reach goes far enough and he causes enough damage, I don"t think that"s going to matter. What if he gets the land magic to swallow most of it up and we can"t find a way to get out of the other parts? We"ll still be trapped, and we"ll still die." She shook her head. "I don"t pretend to understand how all this works, but he is causing the earth to quake out there-and we"re feeling it in here-so to a certain extent what he is doing will affect us. I"ve never encountered a magic user of his strength before."
Immediately Nikolas said, "We have to step up our game. Mapping the house and labeling the shifts just became a group effort. We"ve got to get this done so we can a.n.a.lyze our findings and figure out if there"s a pattern we can use to reach Lyonesse."
He didn"t say what they were going to do if they couldn"t reach Lyonesse, Sophie noted, and n.o.body asked him. He went on to explain how they were going to map.
Sophie would locate the shifts and move on, leaving the men to work in pairs to paint the borders, test and catalog the time differences. When each pair finished, they would run to catch up. The process would be b.u.mpy, and there would be some time lags as they moved through each shift, but it was still the quickest way to get the job done.
"And it"s very important to make note of whatever we"re seeing outside the windows," Sophie added. "We need to try to figure out if there"s a pattern-or if anything seems familiar to you."
As she said it, she prayed, please let there be a pattern. Please let someone see something they recognize from home.
"Grab supplies and be quick," Nikolas told them. "Get food, water, lanterns, and tools. We might have to force our way into s.p.a.ces. When we head out, we won"t stop until we"re done."
She and Nikolas stood in tense silence as they waited for the men to join them. The low rumble started again, shaking through their feet. It reached a peak, then subsided.
She couldn"t imagine what kind of Power it took to cause that quake repeatedly. Morgan couldn"t keep it up indefinitely. He would have to rest at some point. If he wasn"t able to break through by evening, they might get a respite overnight.
That did little to make her feel better in this moment. Needing to feel the simple, animal comfort of Nikolas"s proximity, she moved to stand beside him, and in response, he rested a hand at the nape of her neck. She hooked her fingers in a belt loop of his pants. Neither one of them said anything, for which she was grateful. They had both shown themselves quite capable of ruining a moment, but this time they refrained.
Then the men returned, rounding the corner at a jog, and they began. They went down the hall, discovering a library and a chapel and stairs.
"Shift," she said, squatting to draw a quick line with the chalk near one corner of the chapel. Rhys and Cael paused to finish up, while the rest of the group moved on.
There were books in the library, she saw to her amazement, and ma.n.u.scripts, and trunks, presumably filled with things. Apparently, Kathryn Shaw"s ancestors not only didn"t care to keep good records, they also didn"t value reading very much either since they didn"t bother to take the contents of the library with them when they left.
If we live through this, she vowed, this is the first place I"m coming back to.
At that point, Robin came bounding up to join Nikolas and Sophie. He climbed up Sophie"s body and clung to her neck. She let him ride her back, drawing comfort from his presence.
They took the stairs two at a time until she stopped with a hitch. "Shift."
While they waited, she drew a line across the stairway. This time Ashe and Thorne stopped to finish up, while the rest moved on.
Upstairs, they found the family private chambers, six rooms all told. A scattering of items remained behind, along with a few moth-eaten tapestries. There was another stairwell that led back down to the courtyard that held the privy chambers, fruit trees, and the well across the way.
Then there was the kitchen, the b.u.t.tery, the pantry, a smoke room and, down below the kitchen, a larder, which Sophie learned was a place to keep things cool.
"Shift," she said.
And again. "Shift."
"Shift."
Each time she drew a line, and she and Nikolas kept moving, while the others stayed behind in pairs to finish the job. They saw nothing out the windows that looked like it might be Lyonesse. All they saw were variations on the scenes around the house. From one window, they looked out at the courtyard in deep winter. Snow piled in great drifts across the open s.p.a.ce.
There was an interior hall from the kitchens leading back to the great hall. Then, to the back of the courtyard, there were the servants" quarters and what looked to be a small barracks, a room with rotting racks that Gawain said was an armory, and even two cells at the end of a corridor.
"There"s a shift nearby, I can feel it," she murmured, turning around in confusion near the cells at the end of the corridor. She felt like Pac-Man, stuck in a corner with no yellow dots to eat. "How many have we found so far?"
"Eleven," Nikolas said.
They had been combing the house for hours. She was tired, thirsty, and hungry, but n.o.body suggested they quit. The periodic quake that rose from the earth and shuddered through the house"s ancient bones drove them onward.
They had lost two of their pairs, Rhys and Cael, and Rowan and Gareth. G.o.d only knew when the four would catch up with them.
As she turned around again, clenching her hands in frustration, Nikolas dug into his pack and pulled out a bottle of water. He thrust it into her hands. "Take a minute. Drink."
Accepting the need for at least a brief break, she moved down the hall a few yards, away from the others, while she tried to think. Robin jumped to the ground and ran through the rooms in the corridor. The puck appeared to be searching too.
Sophie dropped her pack and eased into a sitting position, with her back against the wall. Sticking her knees up, she propped her elbows on them and buried her head in her hands.
n.o.body said anything, but she felt like such a failure. It was her fault they were all trapped inside the house. She shot off her big mouth and speculated on things that she didn"t know enough about, and because of her, all their lives were now in danger.
Well, and hers too, but by this point, she felt like she deserved whatever she got. She couldn"t even find the stupid shift nearby even though it felt ma.s.sive, like all the other shifts put together.
Another low rumble began, shaking through the house. It vibrated through the stone. She felt it in her a.s.s and through her ankles, coming up from below.
Coming up from below, in the earth, just like the ma.s.sive shift.
Robin caught her attention. The monkey was loping in circles, inside one of the cells. As she stared at him, he slapped the floor with both hands.
Excitement lifted away the dread. She leaped to her feet. "I"ve got it! The shift is below us!"
Quick footsteps came up from behind. At first she thought it was Nikolas, but then hard hands like manacles circled her neck, choking her. Her attacker spun her around so that they faced the other men, clamping her back against his chest with a hand around her throat while out of the corner of her eye, she saw him reach for the knife in his belt. He drew it and held the tip to her jugular.
They were all so much faster than she was. It happened so quickly she barely had time to grab hold of his forearm.
Several feet away, she caught a glimpse of the others-Gawain, Braden, Thorne, and Nikolas. That meant Ashe was the one who had taken her hostage.
The men lunged down the hall toward them. Nikolas"s expression turned savage.
"Back up," Ashe barked. "Back up, or I"ll break her neck! I mean it, Nik-I"ll snap her like a twig. Back the f.u.c.k up!"
The men jerked to a halt.
"I"m going to murder you," Nikolas whispered.
His eyes blazed, and his features seemed to... shift?
She blinked. He looked wrong somehow, monstrous, with talons instead of fingers. She had heard sometimes Wyr partially shifted when they were under extreme emotional stress. Was that what was happening?
"We"re going to walk to the front door, you and me," Ashe growled in her ear. "And then we"re going to walk out of this G.o.dsforsaken place. I don"t have to hurt you if you cooperate and they keep their distance, understand? What happens to you is your choice."
Oh sure, except for the knife to her throat, and by the way, what would happen to her once Ashe got to the front door? He couldn"t let her go and still hope to escape Nikolas, and she had a feeling Morgan would no longer be quite so friendly and nonthreatening if and when they came face-to-face again.
Which spell should she use, telekinesis or confusion? The tip of that knife pressing into her flesh was awfully pesky. Even if he got confused by the spell, he might still retain enough presence of mind to press it home.
Oh man, this was going to suck.
She had to do both actions simultaneously. Bracing herself back against his chest, she pushed as hard as she could against his forearm, lifting the tip of the knife momentarily from her throat-just an inch, but hopefully it would be enough. With her other hand, she reached back and smacked him upside the head.
The blow lifted them in the air and sent them flying back several feet. As Ashe crashed into the wall, his hold on her loosened. She crashed into Ashe, which wasn"t quite as bad as stone, but it was still bad enough. A line of burning pain flared along her collarbone as the edge of his knife ran across her upper body. They fell in a sprawling tangle of arms and legs.
She didn"t have to win this fight. All she had to do was get out of the way. Kicking free of him, she rolled and kept rolling.
A heavy weight slammed down on her. Ugh!
She got ready to smack Ashe with the other telekinesis spell, but then she realized the man was covering her body with his.
"Easy, la.s.s," Gawain muttered in her ear as he sheltered the back of her head with both hands. "I"ve got you."
Overhead, there was a cyclone of savage movement and breathless cursing. She tried to turn her head to see what was going on, but Gawain"s hands were in the way. She gasped, "I can"t see."
"Hold on."
As the fight shifted down the corridor, Gawain lifted off her. Hooking one arm around her waist, he picked her up and ran several feet away. Only then did he set her on her feet, and together they turned to the confrontation.
Nikolas was the cyclone, but she knew that before she ever laid eyes on him. He had drawn his sword and was slashing with vicious, brutal accuracy at Ashe, who gave way down the hall and parried as well as he could with his knife.