Page 144 of Time's Fool

Waiting on her choice.

And, finally, she made it.

She thrust the staff at the sky. “Tremolina!”

Chapter Forty-One

From my position below the vampire, I watched the two witches talking. I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but the redhead, the one called Gillian, I had seen before in my mind when Mircea spoke to her in Faerie. She had looked different then; gayer, more carefree.

Now, she suddenly looked ten years older, and like a weight had been dropped onto her shoulders, a crushing burden. And yet she bore it, and thrust the staff skyward, and spoke a word I didn’t know that caused a portal to appear, bursting into existence on a mighty rush of power in a night already full of it.

Only this one was wrong.

This one was very wrong.

I could feel it in the air, a wild fluctuation of energy completely unlike even the ratty, low-cost portals I had known before I started keeping such lofty company. Those would curl your hair—and deafen you and rattle your body to the point of illness—whereas this one seemed more likely to fry it right off. Along with the rest of you, I thought, as sticks and leaves from the surrounding area were sucked in and promptly incinerated.

That thing wasn’t stable, not even enough to stay in one place. Nor was it the usual flat disk I was used to. It looked like a phenomenon a sailor had once described to me, which the Spanish called a tornado, only upside down. The great maw was rotating in the air overhead, pulling everything toward it, and the pipe of spinning winds that formed the end spiraled up into the air like a nightcap with a long tail.

I had never seen anything like it.

But it was deafening, to the point that I could barely hear my own thoughts, and strong, pulling people’s hair and clothes and anything else not nailed down in that direction. And it was moving, like a predator loosed upon the glade that was now searching for prey. But the witches here weren’t novices and they were smart enough to stay away from it, with several breaking out broomsticks just in case.

All except for one, the main one, because Morgan wasn’t going anywhere. Although not, I thought, by choice. Because the redheaded witch, Gillian something, had grabbed her and appeared to be trying to force her inside the portal’s mouth.

She wasn’t having much luck, but Morgan wasn’t likely to break away, either, for they seemed pretty evenly matched in strength. I was surprised by that, having assumed that the demonic power Morgan had leeched from her partner would have given her the upper hand. But I guessed the staff equaled the odds, because they both appeared to be struggling.

Only one of them had an army with her.

And despite the howling of the storm and the blinding swirl of forest debris, including small rocks that pelted me even as I clutched the ground, the witches were trying to help their leader. They wasted no time throwing spells at Gillian, but none of them connected. The whirlwind sucked them in as soon as they got close, adding their power to its already unstable nature.

The good news was that they didn’t seem to be destabilizing it any more.

The bad news was that I wasn’t sure that that was possible.

The witches didn’t seem to be, either, and were keeping their distance, not getting too close to the rotating mouth. It was circling over the fight and spitting out lightning, or whatever strange substance resided inside one of those things. A strand of which snapped overhead like a whip and jolted me out of my shock, reminding me of what I was supposed to be doing.

I glanced up at Marlowe, who was still thrashing in mid-air. The hold the witch had on him appeared to have been weakened by her fight with Gillian, and he was moving heaven and earth to break the rest of it. Considering his flammability, and the amount of stray lightning escaping the vortex, I didn’t blame him.

It was, however, about to make my life a lot harder.

And then he succeeded, or else the witch lost her grip, and he suddenly fell, hard enough to carve a divot as deep as his body in the muddy ground. Yet it delayed him hardly at all. He was back on his feet in an instant, however unsteadily.

He must really love her, I thought, as he took off.

I almost hated to do this, but orders were orders.

“What the devil?” Marlowe hit the ground and thrashed some more, glaring and snapping his fangs at Morgan until he realized—she wasn’t doing this.

“Don’t fight me,” I warned, as I dragged him back by the tether I’d looped around his ankle.

“What are you—” he broke off, finally spotting it, and reached down to snap the thing, which merely looked like a bit of rope.

But I don’t hunt normal prey and I don’t buy normal rope.

And although Morgan had relieved me of my weapons while my spirit was absent from my body, she hadn’t noticed the bit of spelled twine I had wrapped around my wrist.

“Let me go!” a furious master said, when he failed to release himself.

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