Alight The Peril (7 page)

“You’re a Shield,” I breathed.

“Look at you, such a sharp one.” He cracked a smile, flashing a row of perfect, square, bright-white teeth. He held out his hand. “Up you go.”

My heart skittered when I remembered how I’d gotten here. I looked around wildly. “Where’s Harriet?”

“She didn’t want to stay and fight,” he answered.

I gripped his hand, uncomfortably warm to the touch, and let him pull me to my feet. I half turned to peer through the dark, my heart still in my throat. “Are you sure?”

He dropped my hand as soon as I stood steady.

“No worries. She’s gone,” he said. No worries? She’d nearly turned me into her zombie servant. That seemed more than enough cause for some worry. I took a breath, trying to slow the uncomfortable pounding in my chest.

I squinted up at him and his eyes roamed my face, seeming to drink in my features. “Are you, um, real?” I asked.

He grinned wider. “Real as you are. Why don’t you tell me your name, Pyxis?”

I stared at him a moment. This guy was a Shield. There was
another
Shield besides Mason. “Corinne. Um, Corinne Finley.”

He threw back his head with a short laugh. “Beauty! Can’t wait to tell the others I finally ran into you. I’m Zane.”

He offered his hand for a formal shake, and I grasped it with weak fingers. I peered curiously into his face. His straight, nearly black hair was just long enough to be pushed behind his ears. A large-ish nose dominated his face, but it gave him a mature, even handsome look, rather than making his features appear unbalanced. A silver bar pierced his eyebrow. His sharp blue eyes remained trained on me, his gaze unblinking and direct.

“Glad to finally meet you, Corinne Finley,” he said so low, it was nearly a whisper. I looked away from the intensity of his stare.

“I don’t understand,” I stammered, looking down at my feet. “If you’re a Shield, that means. . . .”

“Yes, another pyramidal union. We’re at the Perth convergence.”

“Perth?”

“Western Australia.”

“So you have a Pyxis, and—”

“Right, two Guardians.”

I was a dizzy rush of emotions I couldn’t begin to identify. Another pyramidal union? Another Pyxis? Something like wonder bloomed in the center of my chest and spread through me in a warm wave. I wasn’t the only one. “What are you doing here? How did you know about the Tapestry Lake convergence?”

“I was looking for you, of course.”

“But why?”

Zane arched a pierced eyebrow at me. “Seems you need some help, Corinne Finley. Good thing I came along when I did. Dinkum Pyxis had you in a spot of trouble.”

I gave him a blank look.

“The false Pyxis. That woman who had you in the grip of the influence.”

The memory of Harriet, of falling under the spell of the green influence, and of sinking away from my own mind, losing my grasp on everything that made me who I was rushed back, and light-headedness swept over me for a moment. I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to steady my thoughts.

“I’m afraid to ask. . . . What’s a false Pyxis?”

“Right like it sounds. This is the first one I’ve ever encountered, though. The Pyxis talents manifest in the falsie right alongside the true Pyxis. Weaker than the true Pyxis, but still dangerous.”

I shoved my fingers through my hair and then let my hands drop to my sides. I looked up at Zane. His eyes were the color of pale blue polar ice. They were mesmerizing. “So what’s the cure for a . . . a false Pyxis?”

“That I don’t know. I managed to startle her enough that she popped right out of the dream world. But she wasn’t expecting me.” He gave me a sharp look. “You must not let her influence the rest of your pyramidal union. She’ll try to take it over, or so the lore goes.”

I groaned, and my stomach wadded itself into a worry ball. As if I needed one more thing to deal with. “Great,” I muttered. “Well, thanks for, um, saving me.”

“My pleasure. Now that I’ve found you, there’s some—”

Corinne!
Mason’s alarmed voice tore through my head. I slapped my hands over my ears and winced my eyes shut. When I opened them, Mason’s face loomed inches from mine, his hands squeezing my shoulders, his fingers digging into my shoulder blades.

“What? Stop that, you’re hurting me,” I said, squirming out of his grip. I looked around groggily and recognized the TV room. Ang sat wide-eyed at the other end of the sofa, staring at us.

Mason blew out a relieved breath, then gave me a look of such deep concern my heart melted into a puddle of warm goo in the center of my chest. “For a second there, I wasn’t sure if you were coming back. It was like I’d lost my link with you for a few minutes.”

Zane’s blue eyes. His warm hand steadying me.

“I met another Shield in the dream world. We’re not the only pyramidal union.” I looked at Ang, then back at Mason. I dropped my gaze to the floor, my stomach tightening.

“Are you sure you weren’t just having a regular dream, Corinne?” Ang asked. Worry lined her face. I couldn’t blame her. I sounded more than a little crazy.

Understanding lit Mason’s eyes. “No, I think it was real,” he said. “That’s probably why I lost my link with you. The other Shield must have caused some kind of interference or something.” His face clouded.

“You scared the daylights out of me,” Ang said, her voice shaky. “I tried to wake you up when my alarm went off, and it was like you were in a trance.”

Then all at once, I remembered what day it was.

I glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes ‘til nine. “We have to meet Sophie soon.” I turned to Mason. “You can wait while we get ready, if you want, and then come with us. We can take Ang’s mom’s car.”

While Ang was in the shower, Mason and I made sourdough toast with huckleberry preserves. Then, the three of us shoveled in the toast and downed some orange juice before trooping out to Ang’s mom’s Volvo.

Would this work with Sophie? What did it mean that there was another pyramidal union, and in Australia of all places? What was Zane about to say when Mason snapped me out of my dream? Most unnerving of all, what was I supposed to do about a false Pyxis?

I scanned the empty sidewalks, half expecting Harriet Jensen to fly at us. A residue of her influence still coated my mind like a scummy film. Ick. I wished I could open the top of my cranium and douse my brain with stain remover. I heard Zane’s lilting accent, warning me that she’d go after my friends. Just how vulnerable were Ang and Mason? And how could I protect them?

Ang turned onto Wild Rose, and up ahead, I saw Sophie standing near the signpost where Mason kissed me last winter. The memory tugged at me, trying to beckon me away from the present and back to a time when I could lose myself in Mason’s hazel eyes. When life was so much simpler. But I couldn’t afford self-indulgence. Now, a flier for the Summer Solstice Carnival adorned the post. We had less than six weeks. I formed a faint swirl of green in my mind and pushed it at Sophie. I rolled down my window and watched as the question in her eyes melted away to a look of benign attention.

I was so accustomed to Sophie’s disdain, or outright hostility. I’d expected this vacant, docile Sophie would be easier to deal with. But somehow she wasn’t. Anger and hurt flashed through me. What had I done to deserve her hatred? For a moment I wished she were her lucid self so I could demand an answer. My insides still twisted up in the same familiar way. I forced a neutral expression and gave her a level stare.

“Morning, Sophie,” I said and poked my thumb over my shoulder at the backseat. “Get in.”

|| 8 ||

SOPHIE, ANGELINE, MASON, AND I followed Aunt Dorothy into the living room, where Mr. Sykes sat in one of the two club chairs near the fireplace.

A surprised smile animated Mason’s face. “Mr. Sykes, hi. What are you doing here?”

We looked back and forth between Aunt Dorothy and Mr. Sykes.

“Harold is here to help you, my dear,” she said to Mason. “The two of you are going to have a chat while I stay here with the girls.”

“Oh. Okay.” Mason glanced at me uncertainly, but he followed Mr. Sykes as the old guy hobbled with his cane out the front door.

Aunt Dorothy lowered herself onto the other club chair and indicated we should sit. She gave Sophie an appraising look. “Sophie is still under your influence, I see. You did well, my dear. Now, I will need you to continue holding her while I explain why they’re here. You will need to attenuate the green if you sense her resisting, and add a bit of orange to keep her mind open. You also may need to toss in a splash of the yellow, if you feel her slipping away from you.”

The right amount of orange would elicit honest answers, while too much would send someone into gut-spilling diarrhea of the mouth. Yellow triggered loyalty. How would I juggle all of that at once? “I’ve never tried to balance and adjust more than one influence at a time.” I chewed my thumbnail and eyed Sophie, who followed the conversation with a vacant expression.

“It will require quite a lot of concentration on your part,” Aunt Dorothy said. “If it helps, just keep your focus on her mind and don’t try to keep up with what I’m saying.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and gathered the essence of the orange liquid. I pushed some to Sophie, and the tiniest bit to Ang. Then I opened my eyes and trained on their expressions as Aunt Dorothy began to talk. Drifting into a focused state, I let her words pass over me without really trying to hear them.

When I noticed Sophie’s expression begin to twitch with apprehension, I pushed a touch more green to her, and added a wash of yellow. Her face relaxed back to neutral. Aunt Dorothy began to explain the convergence and the hypercosmic realm, or dream world, and I sensed growing unease in both Ang and Sophie. I pushed a little more green to them. When my great-aunt described my role as the principal in the pyramidal union, I pushed a bit of yellow to Sophie.

As I kept my mind attuned to the girls’ shifting moods and feelings, I sank deeper into a meditation. As my mind seemed to settle into a peaceful lull, my heart lifted. The satisfaction and
rightness
of the three of us here, with my great-aunt, took me by surprise. I never expected that anything involving Sophie could feel this way, but I wanted to immerse myself in it, absorb it into every cell of my body, like a lizard soaking up the heat of the sun. I felt lighter, buoyed by hope that we would figure this out, and maybe the rift between me and Sophie wouldn’t be impossible to overcome.

After what could have been minutes or an hour, Aunt Dorothy nodded to me. “Reduce all the influences just a bit now.”

Lifting myself from the depths of my meditation, I did as she asked, gathering a faint wash of white influence in my mind and then allowing it to spill over both girls.

“It’s time for Angeline and Sophie to link in
syndesmo
,” she said, and she rose from her chair. “Follow me.”

I let the three of them go ahead as we filed upstairs to the guest room. The
pyxis
box was back on the dresser, where it had been when I’d linked with Mason. Vibrations waved from it in rhythmic bursts, and I stared at the box. A melody whispered through my mind, and for a second, I wondered if it was Mason, singing through our link again. But when the song swelled in my ears, I recognized a multitude of instruments playing many melodies that chased each other, weaving a song so beautiful it made my chest ache. I closed my eyes, lost in the sound, and I inhaled as a breeze carrying something green and lovely—maybe fresh-cut grass mixed with crushed lavender—enveloped me.

Then without warning, the melody dissolved into dissonance and disappeared altogether. I strained, trying to catch a note or two, to will it to return.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Aunt Dorothy’s voice broke my trance. I looked into her eyes, my lips parted, on the verge of asking her if she’d heard the beautiful song. But her eyes held only slight concern. No way she could stay so composed in the presence of something so beautiful.

I cleared my throat. Maybe I was losing it.

“Yeah, just a little dizzy, but I’m okay now.” I forced a smile.

“Even though you’re able to affect the influences, I will use the liquids as I did with you and Mason,” she said, turning to the
pyxis
. “It’s very important to get the balance just so, and we must not take the chance of an error. Go ahead and rectify the influences.”

With every passing second, I became more convinced I’d imagined the song and the smell of fresh greenery. The bedroom window wasn’t even open.

With a push of white, I washed away all of the influences I’d imparted. Now that Sophie was left completely to her own will and thoughts, would she flip out and start hollering at everyone? I waited, and she just watched me with a curious near-frown. I was so accustomed to her guarded, hostile glare, I couldn’t help but stare back.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her. The question sounded lame, but I really wanted to know what was going through her head, even at the risk of shattering her calm.

She met my eyes in silence for a moment. “I knew this was coming,” she said, seeming to understand the real nature of my question. “Well, I didn’t know it would be
this
, exactly.” Her gaze flicked over to the
pyxis
box. “But something important. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had . . . dreams.”

I wanted to gape at her, but I controlled myself. That had to be a record for the most sarcasm- and vitriol-free words she’d said to me in years. I waited for her to elaborate, but she turned to my great-aunt. She and Ang settled, side by side, on the bed, and Aunt Dorothy dropped inky black liquid on each of their tongues. They made nearly identical sour-lemon faces, and I tried not to snicker. Aunt Dorothy diluted one drop each of orange, yellow, and green into a glass of water, stirred it, and then divided the solution between two clean glasses.

She directed the girls to let each other drink from their glasses. Ang held her glass up to Sophie’s lips, and then Sophie did the same for Ang. When they finished, I took Ang’s glass and Aunt Dorothy took Sophie’s, and within seconds, both of them fell back on the bed, unconscious. Aunt Dorothy closed the
pyxis
and left the room.