Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,48
this reason, but my stomach decided to rid itself violently of every last bit of contents anyway. When that misery was over, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and crawled away.
To get my bearings, I leaned against a stone wall and waited for the nausea and dizziness to subside. After my eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, it took several seconds for my surroundings to make sense.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed.
When traveling by mirror to another world without a corresponding mirror on the other end, a traveler emerged at their destination in the same place as the mirror they used. That meant I’d come out in the Broken World in what should have been their version of sub-level one of the headquarters of the Vampire Court of the Western United States.
And maybe it had been, fifty or a hundred years ago. Instead of walls and a ceiling carved with spellwork, I saw collapsed stone, no ceiling at all, and far above, a starry night sky in place of the manor’s famous soaring rotunda. I’d landed not in an elegant mansion, but in the basement of an abandoned building.
In this world, Northbourne was a crumbling ruin. If I hadn’t been so sick and hurting, I would have smiled.
The building wasn’t the only immediately noticeable difference between this world and my own. Waves of natural magic rose and fell around me like swells in the ocean. I recognized earth and air magic, but to my surprise, they felt distinctly unlike my own. The little amount of water magic I had because of my connection to Malcolm told me the water magic here was different too.
The magic here wasn’t just different; it was far more powerful, as if I were standing right on top of or conducting power from a ley line. That matched what Adam had told me, but hearing magic was more potent and experiencing it were two very different things.
I suddenly worried whether I would be able to use my magic here. As an experiment, I raised my hand and tried to create cold fire on my fingers with earth magic. Instead of the small green flames I expected, cold fire shot out with tremendous force, as if my fingertips were flamethrowers. If anything had been within fifteen feet of me at that moment, I would have incinerated it.
“Shit!” I tried to extinguish the fire. “Shit, shit, shit,” I chanted as I struggled to rein in my own magic—something I hadn’t had trouble doing since the age of five.
When the fire finally vanished, I took off my backpack and got to my feet. I ached like I’d fallen down the side of a mountain and hit every rock on the way to the bottom. Most of my injuries were minor except for the slashes on my shoulder and left thigh.
Now that I had my feet under me—both literally and metaphorically—I reached for the magic in the buzzing crystal in my arm cuff. “Release.”
Malcolm appeared. “Hey, Alice. Told you we’d make it. Jeez, you look like ten miles of bad road.”
When I didn’t respond, he frowned. “Why are you staring at me? Do I have something in my teeth?” He looked down at himself. His eyes widened. “Holy crap!”
I swallowed. “Yeah—holy crap.” I poked him with my index finger. Normally, my hand went through him, and he felt like thick fog. Instead, my fingertip hit something solid. “You feel almost real.”
He rolled his eyes. “I am real, Alice.”
“You know what I mean. How do you feel?”
He started to float toward me, then paused. Carefully, he took a step forward, and then another. “Like I’m real,” he said in disbelief. “Alice, I’m real here!”
I didn’t point out that he’d just mocked me for saying the same thing not ten seconds ago. “You’re almost solid and the magic here is completely different. So far, this is more like the Weird World than the Broken World.”
Malcolm looked up from marveling at his own hands and gestured at our surroundings. “I dunno—Northbourne looks pretty broken to me. What do you think happened?”
“I have no idea, but this place has been abandoned for a long time. You good?”
“Better than good. Better than you. Looks like something tried to shred you.”
“As I predicted, it was a bumpy ride.” I unzipped my backpack, rummaged around, and took out a black velvet bag and a rolled-up cloth. “Time for a tracking spell. Let’s see where Mariela and that scroll are. Hopefully they’re relatively close by and not somewhere in Europe.