Grave Dance (Alex Craft, #2)(8)

Beside me, Hol y screamed and slammed backward into the concrete. The front of her blouse ripped open, rent by unseen claws.

Glamour.

The beast was a glamour surrounding a magical construct.

“Hol y, it’s not real!”

She screamed, thrashing under something I could barely see. Around me, the Aetheric thrummed, the swirls of raw magic scattering as someone threw a spel at the beast.

The spel hit the construct and then dissolved into the space that the beast only appeared to occupy.

“It’s a glamour!” I yel ed as a ring of bloody bites sprouted on Hol y’s shoulder.

Hol y’s back arched, her arms thrashing at her sides. I reached for her, and the beast’s head snapped up. Unreal eyes focused on me, narrowed. Then it lunged.

I jumped sideways, out of its path. Its flank slammed into my side as it turned, and I stumbled. The thing might look insubstantial, but it had some mass behind it.

Dammit. No, it didn’t.

Glamour was an il usion magic so strong that reality believed it to be true—at least for a while. If you knew something was glamour, and your wil was strong enough, you could disbelieve it out of existence.

you could disbelieve it out of existence.

But it’s hard to disbelieve in an animal actively trying to rip your throat out.

The beast’s gaze locked on me, and again it howled. The sound made me flinch. The urge to hit the ground and cover my ears gripped me, but I couldn’t. Hol y’s too-stil form lay between the beast and me, far too close to its massive claws. I’d seen what those claws could do to a car. I didn’t want to know what they’d do to a woman. I had to draw it farther from her.

Death stepped closer to Hol y, momentarily attracting my attention as he crouched beside her. No, she can’t be . . .

I shook my head, and the beast must have sensed my distraction. Its back legs bunched, preparing to attack. And Hol y would be caught in its charge.

No! I didn’t believe in the beast. In fact, I knew it didn’t exist, and reality had bent to my wil before.

I dove forward, into its attack. I plunged my hands into the misty form just as one of its huge paws landed on Hol y’s chest.

“What I see is true,” I whispered, wil ing with everything in me for reality to agree. To confirm that there was no beast.

Hol y screamed, and the street hung on her high-pitched note. Then the beast dissolved.

A cloud of pale mist exploded around me, and a smal disk fel from where the clump of magic in the beast’s center had been. It hit the sidewalk with a ping, a sound quickly overwhelmed by dozens of yel ing voices. Shouts and screams that I’d zoned out when I’d been facing the construct.

Footsteps rang out over the sidewalk, people heading toward us from every direction. Doors banged open as more people poured onto the street. Hol y pushed herself up from the sidewalk, her hand gripping her savaged shoulder.

“Alex? Oh, my God. It’s just gone? Alex, how did you . . .

?” She threw her arms around me, dragging me down.

?” She threw her arms around me, dragging me down.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her cheek was wet where it brushed my neck.

I stiffened under her touch, her skin hot enough that I winced, but I didn’t pul back. “It wasn’t real.”

Someone in faded jeans, the knees slightly worn, stepped nearer, and Death knelt behind Hol y. I stared at him over the top of her head.

“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered, the words as much to comfort her as to question Death.

He held my gaze, and then nodded, his dark hair brushing his chin with the movement. “She’l be fine,” he said, but he frowned.

He stared at the thin cloud of mist hanging in the air around us. If the cloud had been natural water vapor, the midday sun would have evaporated it in minutes, but this mist hadn’t dissipated. It hadn’t even thinned after I’d first disbelieved the beast.

Death reached out and twisted his hand as if he could wrap the mist around his fist. Then he gave a smal jerk.

The cloud vanished.

I gaped. The thing about soul col ectors was that they collected souls. But how could a glamour construct have a soul? Was that thing alive?

I couldn’t ask. Not here. Not with people crowded around us. No one else could see Death.

Death brushed an escaped curl back behind my ear. “Be careful, Alex,” he said. Then he vanished as the first Good Samaritan reached us.

“Is she al right?” a man asked and someone else yel ed,

“What was that thing?”

An overweight witch in a hat wider than her shoulders lowered her heft to the pavement beside me. “I’m a certified healer,” she said, reaching out to take Hol y’s shoulders.

“Let me see her.”

I let her strip Hol y’s arms off me, and as I felt the tingle of a healing charm being invoked, I slammed my shields back a healing charm being invoked, I slammed my shields back in place. My vision didn’t immediately revert to normal, and I squinted in the bright midday light, which I now perceived as dim and ful of shadows. In the dimness, I searched out my purse. I’d dropped it—I didn’t remember when.

Sometime between Hol y’s firebal and my disbelieving the construct.

I final y spotted the red bag a couple of feet away. As I stooped to grab it, I noticed a smal copper disk. The charm from the beast. I pul ed a tissue from my purse, and, as inconspicuously as possible, plucked the disk from the sidewalk. Through the thin paper, the spel s charged in the disk hummed faintly, but whatever they had been, they were defunct now. The sound of sirens rang in the distance, and I backed away, carrying the disk with me.