Smoke and Memories (The Dark Sorcerer #3) - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,48

felt; it was the strange energy from the Toral ring that bubbled up within her. Jayna needed to resist that too. It seemed as if that power pushed on her, trying to get her to pay more attention to it, to unleash it. Jayna struggled against it, knowing she could not let it out; she needed to hold on to it within herself and maintain that power.

Another explosion thundered over her.

She glanced behind her to see Raollet lingering in the room, the book clutched up against his chest. She shook her head. He wasn’t going to be much help.

Here she had spent months fearing that he would send people after her given what she had done to his shop, but he was terrified.

And if he had told her the truth, then as a scholar, it made sense that he would be terrified. He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t the kind of person to go chasing down somebody else with magic. He wasn’t the kind of person to deal with the sort of power she felt thundering up in the shop overhead.

But she was.

She started up the stairs, already pulling upon power through the dragon stone ring. While the ring connected her to the energy she had within herself, it also connected her to something different, something grander, something that seemed far more expansive. As she held on to that power, feeling the way it flowed out from her, she began to build it up, pushing it in front of her.

Then she reached the top of the stairs.

There was no movement, just a strange energy here.

Smoke covered everything. She saw the haze hanging over the interior of the shop hallway, the back area that she had blasted free to release the El’aras, and worried that perhaps it was the El’aras who had come back, but there was something about it that struck her as unusual.

It was the way the haze persisted.

The smoke man— one of the Ashara?—had returned.

Rather than going any farther, Jayna waited. She traced out the pattern needed to create the wind, added a burst of energy through that spell, and the wind carried the smoke away, lifting it entirely.

It left the hallway empty.

There was no sign of the man.

She held on to a surge of power, wrapping it around her.

It wouldn’t take much more than that. She had to be ready for another blast. When she had faced the man before, she had felt the way he had wrapped his smoke around her protective layer, and though she had managed to overwhelm him, it had involved her tapping into the darkness. She didn’t want to have to do that again so soon. She was still weak from the last attack, and she feared what might happen if she had to tap into that strength again. It might diminish her capacity to resist the dark energy.

She strode forward, but the hallway remained empty.

Strangely, a tingling sort of energy pushed against her.

That’s new. It hadn’t been here when she’d come through before. Jayna held on to the power through the dragon stone ring as she moved forward, using that to hold off whatever energy tried to constrict around her, and preparing for the possibility that there might be an attack.

Nothing came.

She moved carefully, slowly, then stopped.

That tingling pressure began to build.

It wasn’t her imagination. It was real, and it was near her.

Not the smoke magic of the man who’d attacked, but something else. As she continued to move carefully, she looked for anything that might have triggered that feeling. She found nothing—just the energy that was present, something within the room that continued to build.

The hallway was narrow, empty, but she didn’t think she was imagining that power.

There was one way to tell.

Not through her dragon stone ring. That might work, but there was a better way.

The spell she needed was fairly complicated, but it would help her reveal any magic that existed, whether or not it was something she recognized.

Jayna crouched down as she looked along the hall. She began to work the pattern with her left hand, tracing out a series of triangles, then the circles and stars that surrounded them. She then touched it with a bit of the painful power coming from the Toral ring, but not much. There was no point in pouring too much power out of her and into it. All she needed was a bit, something different than that of sorcery.

As she pushed that energy through the spell, it flowed along the