Ever After (Rachel Morgan)

stuck.”
    “I’m going to do a perimeter,” he muttered. “You and Trent do your magic thing.”
    He buzzed off into the dark, and my gaze went to Trent. I didn’t think Jenks was jealous, but it had to be hard to bear that I was putting myself in a narrow spot where anything bad could happen, and probably would.
    “Circle?” Trent suggested, his expression holding both determination and frustration for not being able to do this himself. I didn’t have a problem helping him. I loved Ceri and Ray, too.
    Feeling odd, I reached a hand to the informal but securely scratched circle in the dirt. It was small, but I was sitting. Rhombus, I whispered within my thoughts, and a molecule-thin sheet of ever-after sprang up. It wavered as Trent tested his hold on me through the rings, and at my nod, the circle sprang up strong again. We were good.
    Bis was well within my circle, and he fidgeted, a wingtip sliding out and back in through my bubble. He was the only person in two realities who could pass through my circle. It was why it took a gargoyle to teach a demon—or a witch, for that matter—to line jump. Gargoyles could hear the lines and tell those they were bonded to how to tune their aura so they would be sucked into the right line. What gargoyles got out of the deal was beyond me.
    “Okay,” Bis said as he reached out to take my hands. The harsh discord immediately fell on me, and I tried not to wince. His hands felt small in my grip, and I forced myself to smile reassuringly. “Take a look at your line here,” Bis went on. “I’m going to focus on it, and hopefully the rest of the background noise will go away.”
    My breath came faster as suddenly the only thing I was hearing/seeing in my mind was my ugly ley line with the purple core screaming at me. I couldn’t even hear the pure ting of energy behind it. It was disgusting. “Rachel?” Bis said in a pained voice, and I opened one eye a little. Behind him, Trent was scribing a larger circle around mine that could hold all of us. Wise man.
    “Right.” I turned my awareness to the purple sludge, careful not to get my thoughts near it and possibly get sucked in. Purple, everything was a blaring purple with fading striations of red, the sound of it rushing through me like ants, but the deeper I looked at it, the more I was able to listen past the purple coating to the twining colors behind it. Reds, blues, greens, oranges, and even browns and gold, just like auras, they swirled together but never mixed.
    “Find Newt’s imbalance,” Bis whimpered, and I peeked at him again.
    “Newt’s!” Jenks shouted, and my eyes opened wide to see him sitting on Trent’s shoulder, unable to stay away. “You telling me the line in the backyard—where my kids play—is Newt’s?”
    Bis’s face was screwed up, and he nodded, the tufts on his ears waving. I didn’t like the idea that the line I had claimed as my primary source had been created by Newt, either, but it was what it was. Trent looked a little ill, and I wondered whose half-a-mile-long line was running through his office, back room, and gardens.
    Fingers holding Bis’s, I resettled myself on the gravel path. It was obvious that this tight of contact with the line was hurting him. The discord was too loud, too painful.
    Bis’s grip on my hands tightened. “Now, Rachel.”
    I plunged my thoughts back in the line, ghosting through the purple haze, finding it easier now that I’d done it before, searching, discarding, sifting until I found the half step of red, tiny and lost among the rest. “Got it!” I whispered, heart pounding as I gathered it to me, struggling to pull it free of the rest. It was stuck like Velcro.
    “Bubble it,” Bis said. “Bring it out with you. With us.”
    With a curious flip-flop of thought, I bubbled the color/sound. My eyes snapped open as the connection broke and I suddenly found myself holding the memory of a mess of half-step red vibration in my mind. Trent was sitting before us, just outside the bubble with the line behind him. His eyes were wide, and I wondered how much he was getting through the rings.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jenks said, rising up on a dusting of blue. “That sounds like line jumping to me. Isn’t this what you did to make your broken line to begin with?”
    Bis was smiling, looking exhausted as his wings drooped. “She’s just going to move the imbalance, not herself.” He looked at me, his craggy brow furrowed in warning.