White Hot (Hidden Legacy #2)(98)

“Use your phone,” Rogan said, his voice clipped.

I swung back and snapped a shot with my phone. The awful giant tapeworm appeared on the small screen in all its revolting glory. I thrust the phone at Rogan.

“Crom Cruach. It’s a Prime-level summon, and someone is cloaking it.”

“But why couldn’t you hit it?”

“Because it doesn’t have a material body in our world. They didn’t summon the actual creature, only its magical footprint. It’s still within its own arcane realm. What we’re seeing is a magical echo.”

“If it doesn’t have a body, then how is it damaging the street?”

“It’s made of arcane magic. When the magic comes into contact with our reality, it creates damage.”

Rogan expertly cut off another car.

“So can it hurt us?”

“Oh yes.”

“How do we kill it?”

He flashed a grin, sharp and fast, like a sword coming out of a scabbard. “We kill it with water. It’s in our world because a summoner is keeping it here through a magical bond. Water disrupts the bond. If we drench it in water, it will manifest in the flesh or disappear.”

Hermann Square Park had a huge rectangular fountain.

Rogan made a sharp left onto Smith. The entire left side of the street was blocked by construction barriers as the workers bore into the pavement in front of the Department of Public Works. We barely had two lanes to work with, but they were clear. Rogan stepped on the gas. The Range Rover roared, accelerating, the stone wall of Tranquility Park sliding past us.

I reached into my pocket and found a piece of chalk. We’d probably need a circle . . .

Ahead five children waited on the sidewalk, all elementary school students holding hands, a single middle-aged woman with them. The theater district was just down the street. That was all we needed, panicking kids. A hell of a time for a school trip.

The older woman turned her head. Pale brown hair, attractive face with high, pronounced cheekbones, pale pink lipstick, wide eyes under high arches of eyebrows plucked to thread-thin lines, and the look in those eyes . . . The look of deep, intense satisfaction. Kelly Waller. Rogan’s cousin.

The children walked into the street, holding hands, a human barricade that blocked our way.

“Rogan!” I screamed.

We were going too fast. He’d never stop in time.

Rogan threw the wheel to the right. The Range Rover punched through the narrow opening in the Tranquility Park’s wall. I caught a glimpse of a concrete picnic table. The Range Rover smashed into it with a sickening crunch. The airbag punched me in the face. The momentum jerked me forward, the seat belt burning my shoulder. The heavy car flew, airborne for a torturous moment, and plunged down, rolling into the grass. We stopped upright, the air bags hanging limp from the dash. I tasted blood in my mouth.

“Nevada?”

“I’m okay.”

Rogan snarled like an animal and yanked his seat belt off, his face inhuman, aggression rolling off him like heat.

I had to get out of the car. I clicked my seat belt, jerked the door open, and stepped onto the grass. White chalk lines burst into cold flame around us. We were inside an arcane circle, so huge it had to be thirty yards across. The symbols pulsed once, the fire surged, and then something reached down my throat with slimy cold hands, grasped my insides, and tried to rip them out of my mouth.

The ground vanished. I flailed in midair, suspended in some primordial darkness, agony twisting and breaking me, wringing my bones, and then the blackness tore and I collapsed on an ice-cold floor, the pain a fading echo in my joints. My breasts hit a rough cold surface. I was naked. Rogan fell next to me and rolled to his feet, naked.

I blinked, trying to clear away tears.

The street was gone. Houston was gone. Instead a football-field-sized stone cavern surrounded us. All around, slender concrete columns stretched in neat rows to support a stone ceiling three stories above us. Round electric lights illuminated the space, glowing with yellow radiance at the top of the columns.

Arcane lines burned with turquoise around us. We were inside a circle—the most layered and complex circle I had ever seen—drawn on the concrete floor. Inside the circle, that floor was bare, but outside of the lines it was white with frost. A narrow foot-wide channel of power made of perfectly straight lines fed the circle. I raised my head. Ten feet away the channel of power widened into a second, smaller circle. In the middle of it, naked and covered with blue glyphs, sat David Howling.

“Hello,” he said and smiled.



It was cold. It was so unbearably cold. I got off the floor and hugged myself, trying to hoard what little heat my body had. Next to me Rogan stood, his shoulders squared, his feet apart, the muscles of his thighs tight as if he were ready to leap forward. Looking at his face, I could hear David’s bones breaking. Unfortunately, he was all the way over there, and we were here, trapped inside the circle.

It was a hell of a circle too, complex and twisted. The base of it had to come from Pùbù, a higher-level circle named after the Mandarin word for waterfall. Pùbù started as two circles, one large, one small, connected by a narrow channel of power about eighteen inches wide. The smaller circle fed the larger one, the channel focusing and magnifying the mage’s power, like a lens. David had modified it, adding another row of glyphs, a second border, and odd constellations of smaller circles branching out from the outer boundary.