The Undead Pool (The Hollows #12)(90)
Author: Kim Harrison

“Ayer!” someone shouted as I tried to stay still and failed. “What do you want us to do!”

“Stand down!” he shouted, backing up out of my reach. “I want her alive!”

Swell, he wants me alive? “Listen to me,” I said as I got my feet to stop moving. “I know you think Landon is helping you, but once the masters are dead, he’s going to turn on you. You’ve got to stop this. Now!”

Behind him, I saw uneasy glances and guilt, but Ayer studied me calmly, noting the Goddess inside. “I know Landon lies, but that doesn’t mean he’s not useful. My original aim was smaller. A personal choice limited to a building or a room. With his help?” he said, a graceful hand shifting to encompass the entire city. “We can end the suffering of all our people. I agree it’s less than ideal right now, but as soon as all the masters die, the living will submit, faced with a true death and no second chances. Landon doesn’t control us. I control us.”

Again there were downcast eyes. The Goddess saw it, and I told her what it meant. Ayer had gone beyond what his people had wanted. There was a schism. There was a chance. “Yeah?” I shuffled forward a step, trying not to. “What makes you so sure you can outfox him? He already set you up. Told the FIB it was you all along.”

Ayer smiled, beautifully oblivious. “He lost his faith, and without that, elves are easy to control. That, and he wants to see you dead.”

“My existence is singular,” the Goddess said through me, and Ayer’s focus sharpened as he heard the difference. “I cannot die. I can only become. And you can’t make me.”

“She’s completely nuts!” someone whispered.

“No. She’s got a god in her,” Ayer said tersely. “Are we in the green? Run it.”

I spun. The Goddess didn’t understand my alarm as a man flicked a lever on a panel and the lights dimmed. Far away, I heard a thrum, and a thump shifted the air.

Elation not mine pulsed through me. It was the Goddess, and she strengthened inside me until I staggered and fell to a knee. It was her thoughts. Her missing self. She’d found them!

“No!” I cried out, even as she forced us upright and staggering to the center of the room before the windows, arms outstretched as she searched.

“Don’t touch her!” Ayer bellowed, and I wrestled just enough control from the Goddess to make a circle. She was oblivious as bullets zinged and ricocheted.

“I said leave her alone!” Ayer screamed, yanking the weapon from the nearest man. “I will drop the next man who touches a trigger! Use the darts!”

The Goddess’s dismay cascaded over me, heady and unending. They refuse to become! she wailed, and I floundered, trying to get her to listen to my one single thought that it was the machine that held them captive. Destroy the machine, and they’d be free. Would I survive it? I wondered, but the Goddess’s grief was my entire existence, and I’d do anything to make it stop.

“The machine?” the Goddess exclaimed through me as she finally listened, and I felt ill with the sudden rise of emotion. “They’re caught in the . . . In that?”

Together we looked at the machine, and with an odd twist, I felt myself see with her awareness, feeling the tiny space the machine created to hold thoughts born and existing in the space between. I stared at it, my awe coloring her outrage. It was a tiny bubble pulled out of time, created with wild magic and science. Landon had created a new ever-after, but one so small it could be lost on the head of a pin. It was all they could muster, but it was enough to hold a Goddess’s thoughts.

“We’re good!” someone shouted, and her outrage flamed as the Goddess finally realized what they’d done. She shook within me, and as I struggled to maintain the circle. They’re blind to me, she thought. I hear them singing, and they sing the wrong song.

“Release them!” I screamed, but I wasn’t sure if it was me or the Goddess.

“Ready . . .” Ayer said as they backed up, and I saw the circle of wire they’d put about me. “Now!”

My eyes widened as a man at a bank of equipment shoved a thick lever up. Lights dimmed, and the thrum pounded through me. A scream ripped from my throat as a wave of pure wild magic cascaded from my soul to my fingers, outstretched in pain. It struck the machine full on, and I cowered inside as the Goddess stood firm, arcs of electricity dancing in the suddenly dark room, waves of black energy surging back and forth between the walls, now bowed out and cracking ominously.

And with a bang that echoed in my soul, the bubble of time popped.

No . . . I thought as suddenly the air sparkled. Wild magic. It was everywhere, and a cloud of freed mystics hazed the air. I felt them inside me as I breathed, blinked them from my eyes like tears. But the Goddess gloried in them, her thoughts bright with power as she called them to her, waiting to bring them home to become with her again.

“Get up! Get up!” someone was screaming, the faint glow from the sky the only light in the room. “Divert power! Increase flow. Take them! Take them all!”

The room was both pitch-black and bright as day as mystics glowed in my mind’s eye. Madly moving silhouettes between me and the glass darted, and the Goddess danced within me.

That is, until the first few thoughts of her failure reached me. The mystics were not responding, even the ones she’d just sent out to bring the others in.

“Increase it!” Ayer shouted. “Get out of my way. I’ll do it myself!” he snarled, shoving the dazed man out of his chair and taking his place. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I knew it was him by the sparking of neurons in his brain. “I want all of them!”

Elation dimming, the Goddess seemed to hesitate. They’re not my thoughts, she said, turning inward to me, her sole guide to this madness of mass. They won’t become!

The rapid shift of emotion was draining, and I staggered, going down before the windows. “I told you they were changed,” I whispered, and she snatched control back.

“They corrupted and stole my thoughts,” she said aloud through me, and Ayer met our eyes in the emergency lights now flickering on. He was pleased. His mystics had escaped, and he was thrilled. Something was wrong, but she wouldn’t listen to my one thought among her thousand. “These singulars will no longer be dreamed!” she shouted with my voice, and I found myself standing, unable or too sick at heart to stop her.

“You will die!” she raged, my body shaking with her anger. “I am all! Everything! You are one singular! You can’t make me become!”