Moonshadow (Moonshadow #1)

Good. I didn’t want to disturb you. You needed the rest.

She was so focused on him she almost forgot to watch for the place where she had felt the shift until they had almost stepped over it.

“Wait!” she said, grabbing his arm. “We’re here.”

The hall looked the same in both directions. Nikolas frowned. “I can’t sense it.”

“Maybe this one is a smaller shift, and you’ll be able to sense a bigger one,” she said. She frowned. “How are we going to measure what happens on either side of a shift? We can see the hall clearly—just like we can see the house from outside—but there will be a difference once we step to the other side.”

“I think one of us needs to step over, while the other stays on this side,” Nikolas told her. “Then we each count to ten. We can practice how fast we count so that we’re keeping the same time. The first one who hit ten reaches for the other one. Since clocks don’t work, it’s not going to be an exact measurement, but it will give us an idea of what to expect.”

“Okay, let’s try it.”

They practiced the beat of the count a few times, then Nikolas told her, “See you on the other side.”

He stepped over the shift, and she started to count. When she hit seven, he reached for her hand and stepped to her side again. “That is so strange,” she muttered.

“What number did you hit?” he asked.

“Seven, and we couldn’t have been counting that far off from each other. So this means down the hall that way, time flows faster than it does over here and in the great hall.” Kneeling, she opened her pack and pulled out a small can of white paint and a brush. “They didn’t get colors.”

“I don’t think they understood what you wanted.”

She gave him a sidelong grin. “Doesn’t matter. We can just number the zones.”

Nikolas pulled out a pad of paper and sketched as she painted a line across the hall, then to one side by the wall, she painted 7:10. “The seven is on this side of the shift. The colon is the shift itself, and the ten is on the other side. Make sense?”

He nodded. “It does.” He pointed down the hall. “One thing—we don’t want to number that zone. We might go all the way around the house and come at this hall from the other side. If we label that ‘zone two’ right now and keep numbering zones as we find the shifts, this area might end up getting labeled ‘zone nine’ on the other side. To avoid confusion, I think the only zone we can label right now is the great hall.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” She sat back on her heels. “So the only things we should map right now are the floor plan and the shifts. We can label everything afterward.”

“Right.” He squatted beside her, leaned forward, and gave her a quick, hard kiss.

Hey. That wasn’t playing by any of the rules either one of them had set up. She scowled, disturbed, maybe a little angry, and maybe more than a little delighted. “Stop that.”

“I need to hear you say it.” Nikolas’s dark eyes were intense, heated, and far too close for her comfort. “Say, ‘Nikolas, I want you to stop that.’”

He wanted to hear the truth or falsehood in what she said. “No. I’m not going to play your games.”

“I’m not playing any games, remember?”

Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. Turning her face away, she stood as she asked, “Then what the hell are you doing?”

“I can’t leave you alone. I don’t want to.” He rose to stand beside her, still too close. “I heard the lie in your voice when you said last night was the last night.”

“Screw you, Nik.” She gave him a look filled with bitter hurt. “I heard the truth in yours, when you said as soon as you got me out of your system, you’re gone.”

His expression changed. As he reached out to her, a low rumbling noise started and rose in volume until Sophie could feel it vibrating through her feet.

Dread bolted through her. “What is that? It sounds like an earthquake.”

“It’s Morgan,” Nikolas snarled. “He’s calling up the land magic.”

They raced back to the great hall and the front window, where the rest of the men had gathered, their expressions grim. Slowly the rumble died away. Nikolas shouldered his way to the window. There were too many men in the way for Sophie to follow him, so she climbed on the hood of the Mini to look out.

The low rumble began and rose in intensity. Rubbing a clear spot on the dirty window to peer through, she saw Morgan kneeling on the lawn, hands flattened, his pose similar to the one Nikolas had used when he had buried the Hounds. Morgan’s head and shoulders were bowed, and even from that distance, she could see the strain in his body. Behind him, a tree toppled over and crashed into the roof of the cottage.

Rage and fear hit in equal measures. “He’s destroying my property!”

Nikolas said harshly, “This must be how he broke the crossover passageways. He’s using land magic to try to break through to the house. Can he do it?”

She sank both hands into the hair at her temples and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to think. Could Morgan do it? This piece of land wasn’t in alignment with that piece of land. Like Nikolas’s morningstar, any kind of missile wouldn’t make a direct hit.

But this wasn’t a missile. This was a kind of magic she had never encountered before, and if Nikolas could call upon the land magic to bury thirty Hounds, what could Morgan do?

Somehow he could call upon the land magic Powerfully enough to break entire crossover passageways.

Opening her eyes again, she confronted nine sets of eyes watching her intently. Reluctantly she told them, “He doesn’t carry Djinn magic, so he might not be able to get inside the house, but he might be able to bury the house with us in it.”





Chapter Nineteen





Nikolas’s eyes narrowed. “But the house isn’t entirely in his dimension, right?”

“If his reach goes far enough and he causes enough damage, I don’t think that’s going to matter. What if he gets the land magic to swallow most of it up and we can’t find a way to get out of the other parts? We’ll still be trapped, and we’ll still die.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand how all this works, but he is causing the earth to quake out there—and we’re feeling it in here—so to a certain extent what he is doing will affect us. I’ve never encountered a magic user of his strength before.”

Immediately Nikolas said, “We have to step up our game. Mapping the house and labeling the shifts just became a group effort. We’ve got to get this done so we can analyze our findings and figure out if there’s a pattern we can use to reach Lyonesse.”

He didn’t say what they were going to do if they couldn’t reach Lyonesse, Sophie noted, and nobody asked him. He went on to explain how they were going to map.