There is no going back, she thought out at both of the parents.
“Please,” the mahmen begged. “Save him.”
With a heavy heart, Rahvyn called upon her—
The strobing of the room’s lighting fixtures registered through her closed eyes, and she had a dim thought that the blinking had not transpired the last time she had done this. The first time she had done this, rather. To Sahvage.
Then again, that had been centuries ago when it came to linear time. No electricity back in that castle. Candles only. And moonlight.
As the flickering intensified, the pulsing began. She could feel the energy emanating from her body in all directions, not just toward Nate—
Thump. Thump.
Thump.
At the sounds, she opened her lids. The three people who had been around the bedding table had been propelled back against the walls of the room and they were pinned in place by waves of magic that distorted the air, turning the oxygen that should have been invisible into something that was like water’s surface after a stone was thrown into a still pond.
Rahvyn moved without walking to the table, her body levitating and propelling itself upon her will unto Nate’s side. When she focused on his face, shadows were thrown as if a brilliant light was trained upon him, though it was not. There was no illumination, and yet the contrast doubled and redoubled until even the softest contours of his chin and cheeks, his hair and ears, were as if drawn in jet-black ink.
And then all color leached out of him and that which was around him. No more was the sheeting blue, nor his abdomen stained with orange and red, nor the wires red and blue and yellow that ran off the pads affixed to his chest. All was black, white, and shades of gray. His skin, too, became without a tint, that which had been graying now fully there. Thereafter, the distortion intensified and took on further characteristics. He became a leaded pencil rendering of himself, not only black and white, but no longer three-dimensional, all aspects of him flattening out into two.
In Rahvyn’s concentration and summoning of power, she lost track of that which surrounded her and him. Gone were the room, its equipment and its people, disappeared was that corridor and those males outside, null and void became the entirety of Caldwell… and then this New World… and finally the ocean she had crossed and the Old Country from whence they had all originated.
The rotation started slowly, she and Nate making a single turn. And another. And one more and one more after that. Speed began to gather next, the spinning increasing until they were a blur—and yet there was no breeze to riffle her hair or his. Faster, faster… faster still they went. Faster. Faster…
The momentum increased until the revolutions were at such a velocity that the center could not hold. As critical acceleration was reached, there was a great clapping, as if lightning struck a tree.
Upon the sound, they broke free of the spinning and floated in a void. The state of transcendence was an impossibility to describe, and yet an undeniable experience as all opposites became one: both static and spinning, one dimension and yet three, time stopping and also racing, the two of them weightless and more dense than the earth.
Life and death, together. Coexisting. The line that separated the two states of mortality no boundary at all, the distinction disappearing.
Such that Rahvyn could merge the incompatible through her will—
Upon the table that existed and was not existent, Nate’s mouth opened wide and he drew in a tremendous breath that was loud as a yell, silent as a feather landing.
With a lurch, his torso bolted up, his eyes peeled wide, and his hands went to his stomach where he had been shot. As he breathed with desperate, hungry draws, his lungs inflated him out of his two dimensional state, the contours of him reemerging and pulling free of the flatness, the color coming back not just to his face and skin, but all that was around him.
Rahvyn watched, right by his side and from a vast distance away, as he struggled with the divide he now straddled.
And could never leave.
Both alive and dead.
Forevermore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As Erika tore off from the garage, she was running away, running as fast as she could, running for her life.
As her heart pounded and her throat burned, her shoes slapped against the pavement. With a set of car keys in one hand and a—
No, wait, she had guns in both her hands and a key fob hanging off her pinkie. Whatever, like it mattered. The only thing she cared about was getting to the silver Honda that she had to get to because if she didn’t get to the silver Honda she was never, ever going to be safe, ever again. Silver Honda was base. Silver Honda was panic room. Silver Honda was savior—