Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(74)

Its birth was helped by the fact that the main strength of last night’s storm had struck along the shores of the Lower Peninsula. The Upper Peninsula had received a mere sprinkle of rain, and that had come after a long, dry spring.

As a consequence, the land was dry as a bone. A steady northeasterly breeze blew off the Lake and provided a perfect fan for the growing flames.

What a prodigious bonfire he would have.

He continued along the shore and called his creatures to come to the holocaust, until trees exploded from the brilliant heat of leaping red flames while black-winged shadows danced in the psychic realm.

He had come to this earth to start a new life. They just had to come after him, didn’t they? Every time he tried to build something, create his own empire, reach for a new beginning, either she or one of her group was there to get in his way. He had never been able to escape her presence, not once in his excessively long life. He was always aware she lay in wait for him somewhere.

She pushed him to reckless acts of destruction. She made him who he was.

He was sick to death of this cat-and-mouse game. She had a talent for hiding. Very well then, he would smoke her out.

Because people didn’t just vanish. Like all physical creatures they could be measured and weighed.

She could be captured, imprisoned. She could be tortured, killed.

He just had to find her. He had to be clever and take extreme care.

He had another advantage over her. He had remained strong whereas she had grown weak. One good thing had come from chasing Mary and Michael up north. He had been forced to gather most of his servants together. The bitch was close—closer than she had been in a long, long time. She could be measured, dissected.

Destroyed? Would he finally get to taste that elusive freedom?

Oh, he had to be very clever.

He had to push until her iron control cracked. He had cracked her before. He could do it again. He had to make her slip, drop her cloak. Then he would be able to sniff her out, along with the warrior and that elephant-loud clown.

“Come on,” he whispered into the wind that grew ash-tainted and noxious with sparks. His people worked through the night to spread the blaze as fast and as far as they could. Humans and animals burned, and news services called it terrorism, and the green land turned first red, then black as it died.

“Show me where you are,” he murmured as he searched the psychic realm. He arranged the positioning of various creatures and servants and drones, and they all poised ready for an attack.

Just after noon it happened.

She cracked. Grief welled on the air, as fine a flavor as any aged wine. For a marvelous, magical moment her cloak slipped. He couldn’t sense anything more from the bitch than that. But he sensed the warrior’s blade-sharp presence. Most especially he sensed the clown. He dove toward them and inhaled every clue he could with obsessive greed.

The fire hadn’t smoked them out in a literal sense. They were safe, stationary and on an island.

An island?

Then Astra resumed control. Her cloak came back down, but by that time it didn’t matter. He hadn’t gathered much information, but it was enough to take to his army of experts for a consultation, and to study satellite pictures and maps. They searched every graphic representation of the area they could find.

It took hours, but he finally noticed an anomaly between the human-created maps and the satellite pictures that his human servants showed him. He tried to point it out to his human servants. They had an annoying tendency to forget what they saw, no matter how many times he showed it to them.

Victory sang in his stolen veins.

He breathed, “Gotcha.”

Chapter Twenty-six

MARY HUDDLED IN her overlarge, borrowed shirt and rubbed her face. The muscles around her eyes ached from the strain of staring so hard at the hellish black smoke that spread like spilled ink on the blue horizon.

It looked like the earth itself had sustained some unimaginable injury and had cracked wide open. The smoke stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. How large would the blaze have to be to make the entire northern skyline that dark?

She wanted to shout at it. No, no, heal. But she could only heal the body, not the land. The horizon still darkened, and the land still burned.

“I’m going to see what information I can gather.” Michael’s face had settled into grim lines. He strode inside.

Astra stood in the middle of her vegetable garden, hugging herself as she stared north. Mary hovered beside her, until a bitterly sharp wind started to blow off the Lake. She jogged inside, dragged one of Michael’s sweaters over her head, grabbed Astra’s battered jean jacket and went back out.

Astra stood as she had left her. Mary draped the jacket gently over those thin shoulders and held it in place until Astra moved to grasp the edges of the denim.

Astra’s wrinkled face gleamed with damp streaks. There was nothing left of menace, no cheerful malice, no brusque kindness, no furious manipulator, nothing but an old woman bearing a weight of sadness that went so deep it could have broken apart the world.

When Astra spoke, her voice was a thin, dry thread of sound. “He did it.”

“Are you sure?”

The old woman nodded. “I’m sure. You would think that he would get tired too sometimes.”

Mary put an arm around Astra’s shoulders and hugged her close. She whispered, “It’s so senseless.”