Her eyebrows flicked up. “You will do so now. If you are the Soul Complement to the Guardian of the Gate, then you will be strong enough. We will divert the wild magic to you, and you will Ground it. Using the disks.”
“I’m a lightning rod? A storm rod?” I blinked back rain that trickled into the corners of my eyes. “I tapped into a wild storm and it almost killed me.”
“Zayvion wielded all manifestations of magic. It is now your time to prove you can do the same. Prove that you really are his equal.” This last bit she said with more anger than I expected. I got the feeling she didn’t like me very much.
“Zayvion’s had a hell of a lot more training than I have.”
“There is only you. If you don’t channel the magic, the city will burn, magic will explode, melt the conduits, destroy. People will die. Zayvion will die.”
“What? Why?”
“He has been broken by magic. And only magic—dark and light—can make him whole again.”
Holy shit. “So if the storm hits, it’s going to kill him?”
“If we don’t control it, yes.” I did not like the pitying smile she gave me. It looked like she wanted me to fail.
Well, screw that.
The entire conversation lasted all of a few seconds. It scared the crap out of me. But I was getting tired of standing there getting wet and arguing about things I knew too little about.
Not knowing what the hell I was doing had never stopped me before. And so far, not knowing what I was doing with magic hadn’t killed me.
But this time it wasn’t just my life on the line. It was Zay’s life, and the lives of people in the city—Violet’s life, her baby’s life.
If I failed and magic blew out the conduits in the city, thousands could die.
Maybe some of the fear showed on my face.
Victor, who stood next to Sedra, said, “We will guide you. We will be your hands if you falter, your strength if you fear, your breath if you fall.”
That was good and all, but what I really needed was someone to be my sense of self-preservation and oh, I don’t know, tell me to run away now and run real fast.
Since that wasn’t going to happen, I nodded and pushed my fear as far away as I could. I was good at denial.
I walked out into the center of the circle where Jingo Jingo waited for me.
“You’re gonna do just fine, Allison,” Jingo Jingo said in his low, smooth liar’s voice. “You were born for this, made for this.” He smiled, but there was a fevered gloss in his eyes. Even in the rain I could tell he was sweating. Even in the rain, I could smell his lie.
Or maybe I was reading too much into this. Panic will do that to a girl. I took a deep breath, and squared my shoulders.
“What do I need to do?”
Jingo Jingo stepped closer to me and ran his hand down my arm, petting my right shoulder and stroking down to my fingers, which he caught up. It was weird, creepy, invasive. I gave him a look that let him know exactly what I thought about that.
“You’re gonna stand here.” He guided me around the pile of disks so I stood facing Sedra.
Sedra looked calm and cool as an ice sculpture. Which is to say she looked like she always looked.
Well, that and wet. Lightning flashed, painting ragged glyphs across the sky, and for a second, less than that, I thought I saw something else in her, something under her skin that was dark, twisted.
Panic shot through me. I looked at the other users gathered. There was something wrong with their body language. Too many sideways glances, meaningful looks. Even Liddy, my teacher in Death magic, looked tense, as if she was waiting for her cue.
Sedra might be the head of this parade, but I was pretty sure some of the band didn’t want to march.
“All you need to do is hold this,” Jingo Jingo continued. He bent, dug through the piles of disks. They were all the same. I didn’t know what he was looking for. He finally selected one and placed it in my palm. “And meditate.”
Meditate? Oh, yeah. That would be no problem in the middle of a wild-magic storm surrounded by a circle of users—all better trained than me, all giving one another hateful looks—with a big pile of free