Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5) - Allyson James Page 0,99

of nails on glass—Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The pieces of glass flowed into one another, glowing as red as the mirror had under Flora’s spell. The two Janets moved their hands, and the glass slid to the edges of the frame, polished and whole. The mirror’s scream died suddenly away into thoughtful silence.

Emmett snarled and threw a black spell our way. Beneath magic Janet laughed and danced aside. The Stormwalker broke the spell with a bolt of lightning.

“Mick!” I shouted, the two voices of me rising together. “Hold him!”

A dragon talon obligingly came down, closed around Emmett, and shoved him where I pointed—against the mirror.

He fought. Emmett drove spell after spell into Mick with the speed of a machine gun. Mick flinched and shrieked, his claw and leathery skin heating to molten red then icy white, the talon cracking and bleeding.

But Mick was made of tough stuff. He could ignore pain to focus on what he wanted with dragon intensity. Right now, he wanted Emmett against the mirror.

Cassandra was on her feet, chanting words, her fingers moving. I heard her say “Bind,” then black threads fell over Emmett like a steel net. He struggled, but the threads were strong. They bound Mick’s claw as well, but again, Mick wouldn’t care as long as he finished what he set out to do.

The net kept Emmett from breaking free of Mick, but it didn’t stop his magic. He threw a spell at Cassandra, his hand shaped into a claw, and then started to suck off her magic.

Cassandra determinedly chanted again, though her face lost color and she had to slump against Pamela. Even so, she went on with her spell as though resolved that she’d dose Emmett good before she went down.

I didn’t worry about her, because I knew in the end, she’d be all right.

The double me moved to Emmett, neither of us touching the ground. We stood to either side of him, hands with the rings reaching out to the mirror’s frame.

“Reflect,” we said. “See what is inside you.”

I’d never before seen Emmett terrified. Worried a few times, but never out and out scared shitless. I did now. His gray eyes widened, his pupils became pinpricks, and a few drops of blood slid from his nose.

The sight of those scarlet drops bolstered my confidence. When I’d first met Emmett he’d said that when he’d initially begun using great magics, he’d get a nosebleed from the pressure of it, which he’d since learned to handle.

He couldn’t handle it today. That meant my idea was working.

Beneath-magic Janet grabbed the back of his neck and slammed him against the glass. The Stormwalker eased the shard of magic mirror she always kept with her from her pocket and held it behind Emmett, angling it so that the mirror repeated back on itself.

“See,” we said.

Emmett let out a keening sound. The mirror repeated the noise, the wail rising until I thought my eardrums would burst.

The reflection of Emmett, gray-eyed, dark-suited executive shattered into two, then three, then tens, then hundreds. Those images began to change, disintegrating from Emmett into figures of people, so many people.

His victims, I realized. Every single being he’d stolen from since he’d decided to become the greatest mage in all the world.

I saw them, from simplest apprentice to adept mage like the one I’d watched him battle this summer. I saw Gabrielle, then Drake, and then Cassandra at the end of the line of victims, the last he’d siphoned from today.

The mirror showed me all. They stood, some alive and broken, some obviously dead, their shades looking back at Emmett and making me shiver.

“You reap what you sow, Emmett,” I said in my double voice. “And now today, you’ll pay.”

Mick and Cassandra still bound Emmett, so the two Janets put our hands on the mirror and slid every bit of magic we had into it.

“Return,” we said.

“No!” Emmett’s nose began to stream blood, his terror coming at me through the glass.

I held on, relentless. Magic began to pour out of Emmett as fast as the blood, diving into the mirror and then reflecting, not into the hundreds of mages as I’d supposed, but into me.

The rush of it sent me off the ground toward the peeled-back, ruined tin ceiling. I grabbed the frame of the mirror and hung on.

All the magics poured into me, beginning with what he’d managed to pull from Cassandra, Drake, and Gabrielle, to a water mage who’d gotten in his way a few days ago, to more and more mages down