Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (5 page)

Lewis locked away old emotions of regret and loss. The dragon and Gina’s intense interest had lured him into sharing more than he’d meant to. His loneliness was a private matter. Yet the same discipline they’d been discussing enabled him to shut down his emotions and concentrate on Morag’s instructions.

“Clarity of sight is silver for humans. One of Gina’s ancestors described it to me as the reality behind reality. He said that the world he saw with his human eyes was a layer of paint providing a simplistic picture of a truer, crisper, and confusing reality. Clarity of sight lifted that paint layer. I want you to do that with me as your focus. I am unfamiliar to you and my reality is the Deeper Path. I should be an easy subject for you to see truly, unclouded by your experience. Remember to look for silver.”

Morag stood.

Lewis locked his muscles. Instinct had him wanting to be up and ready to fight. Talking with Morag, she had a very human voice. She could have been a lecturer at the Collegium. But when she moved, then his limbic system saw a great and terrifying lizard. Could dinosaurs have evolved into this if they hadn’t died out first?

Or perhaps they had evolved to this, on some distant planet.

Using the meditation technique all guardian trainees were taught to center their magic, Lewis steadied himself. Breathing evenly, he stared at Morag. She remained black. No silver of this alien sight.

“Old patterns of being won’t help you,” she said. “Release them. Do you remember the first time you used magic?”

“No.”

“Really?” Gina asked. “I was seven and dropped the soda bottle on an illicit fridge raid. My magic cleaned up the spill after I wished hard to undo it. I was so shocked, I dropped the ice-cream container, too. Then Mom caught me.” Laughter in her voice, and love. Gina hadn’t been punished for her fridge raid.

Cute stories were irrelevant. Lewis studied Morag, visually tracing the oddness of her intelligent reptilian face. Her eyes were remarkable, a profound blue with pupils of…no, not silver. Light, though, rather than the black voids of human eyes. He answered her question. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t use magic. I liked to see the golden threads and watch them wind around objects. I could make the objects appear and disappear, even float them. My parents are stage magicians, so I copied their conjuring.”

“But you were doing it for real,” Gina said.

“Yes. They taught me not to let other people see my magic. They said theirs was for show and mine was for service.” He remembered the distinction settling into his young mind. There’d been a rightness to it. The golden threads were too beautiful, almost solemn in their power, too important to be wasted on audiences looking for a couple of hours’ entertainment.

Was there gold in Morag’s pupils?

She tilted her head. The slight movement sent new patterns of reflected light from the opal walls dancing over her skin.

He blinked, squeezed tight his eyes and looked again. Silver had shimmered for an instant. And had it gotten cold in here? Extreme tiredness felt like this. Mind and body seemed to grow distant from each other. Detached. He wasn’t exhausted. He made sure he got five hours of sleep every night.

“How old were you when you started Collegium guardian training?” Gina asked.

“Ten.”

“Dear God.”

The shock and disapproval in her voice distracted him. He looked away from Morag to her. “I discussed it with my parents. I wanted to serve. I wanted the discipline of training, to live in one place rather than travel from theatre to theatre. It was like boarding school.”

“You were ten.”

“They wouldn’t accept me any younger.” He studied the dragon again. She was a remarkable creature, large yet balanced. Alien but true to herself. As a child he’d had dinosaur figurines that he’d animated in secret, encouraging them to roam the floors of his temporary bedrooms in guest houses where his parents stayed while on tour. He’d forgotten those games.

“You were ten!” Gina repeated. It sounded like a protest.

Morag, on the other hand—or claw—sounded satisfied. “You loved your magic. So when it burned out, you mourned its beauty. That is good. Look truly, Lewis. Clarity of sight has even more beauty. But you have to let go of what you had.”

“I have.”

“To some extent. That renunciation is why you were able to burn out your magic in the controlled manner that makes this possible. You shed your magic in layers. Consider those layers now.”

He frowned. He hadn’t noticed layers in the urgent, agonizing battle with the Arctic weather mage. He’d pulled on his magic, fed it efficiently through his spell, and then, pulled harder, tearing the magic from the world, through his bones, into the spell until he couldn’t channel any more. It had been a fight for survival with the weather mage. The other mage hadn’t been stronger than Lewis, but he’d been favored by using his own talent (weather magic) and the fact that a storm once summoned had its own force. Lewis had had to fight both.

He had pulled the magic from the world. But that hadn’t been the first step. Every spell began with the coil of magic within a magic user. That was why trainee Collegium guardians were taught to center their magic. The more magic within them, the stronger that initial kindling spark.

So he had started his spell with his own magic, then fed it magic pulled from the environment. Standard practice. But feeling the magic scouring his bones hadn’t been normal. That’s when he’d known he was burning out his magic—and he’d kept going. His prayer had been that the weather mage would collapse before Lewis’s magic failed.

As the man had.

Two other Collegium guardians had found the weather mage three days later. Dead. The autopsy had concluded the man had died from the strain of fighting to control the ice storm. His heart had given out.

But Lewis still wondered. Such a convenient death.

Layers. Magic in him. Magic in the world. Magic feeding through him.

“Magic is a crutch humans use to hop towards the Deeper Path,” Morag said. “You have the potential to change the world, but you do so through your three dimensional bodies. That limits you. But you’ve shed those limits, Lewis. You can see the world as it is.”

“Are you saying I’ll see in more than three dimensions? Is that even possible?”

“I see in seven dimensions, when I concentrate,” she replied. “The Deeper Path will enable you to choose how you see the world, and how you move through it. But first you must open your mind to clarity of sight.”

The first layer. He sank his attention to his center, hollow with the absence of magic. For the first time, he explored that emptiness. Always before he’d searched it for any flicker of golden magic, any familiar echo of that warmth. This time he tried to see the emptiness.

He kept his eyes open, watching the opalescent light of the chamber play over the dragon’s hide. No silver. In fact, the light became a distraction. He closed his eyes. At his center was an absence of magic, but in an odd way he could feel the dimension of the space it had once occupied. Hollow, cold and distant, like the void of outer space.

If travelling from portal to portal via the in-between was a crazy chaos of overwhelming, jumbled sensory input, this was its opposite. But there was something there, something that solidified in his mind even if not tangibly as he chased it.

Channels from his center out to the world. These were the paths through which he’d sucked in magic. He’d not noticed them before because the golden cords of magic had blazed too brightly, obscuring the superstructure that supported them.

Everything faded away, replaced by a vision of himself suspended in a void, pierced by wires of blackness. Magic had poured along those channels, filling him, enabling him to impose his will on the world. Now that magic was gone.

His physical body jolted violently. His vision self convulsed. Golden light flared once in his center and radiated out, lost.

He’d burned out.

He floated in the void. Layers. His center, the world, his body. A total absence of light.

Sparks of silver. One, ten, countless hundreds. Galaxies of patterned movement.

They came closer, touched his vision self.

He screamed.

He opened his eyes and saw Gina huddled on her chair, Morag tall in the center of the chamber, and found himself, floating in midair by the dragon’s raised head. Silver coated his body like icicles. He angled his feet down, as a diver would, and landed lightly.

Silver light danced patterns over and through Gina. He saw her: her life force and magic. The silver light chased along the paths of qi energy. It made her a silver figurine, beautiful and unreal. Exquisite and untouchable.

He blinked and looked at Morag. At least the dragon was unfamiliar. She didn’t have humanity to lose in this new clarity of sight. She soared high, double the size of what was her three dimensional body. That stood within a framework of a silver wire dragon with its massive silver wings unfurled.

The silver dragon smiled.

Lewis flinched at the display of teeth and his clarity of sight faltered. Ordinary, familiar human vision reclaimed him. He concentrated and the silver light returned, overlaying what he’d previously considered the real world.

“Well done,” Morag said. “Now, let it go. You’ll find the sight whenever you want it. Rest.”

He released his concentration on clarity of sight.

Fatigue swallowed him whole. He widened his stance to keep from falling. He was wary of the black dragon in front of him. Unsure what the silver sight meant. It was as if the silver had crystallized inside him. He was freezing, but didn’t care.

“Take him home, Gina,” Morag said. “He needs food and sleep.”

“Lewis?” Gina said uncertainly.

He tore his gaze from the dragon. What was Morag? Alien, yes. What were her intentions? Why had she helped him—was this helping him? The world looked wrong, as if he was a visitor, long gone from home, who’d just returned. He was disconnected.

“Lewis.” Gina clasped his hand.

Her skin was shockingly warm. He fancied he could feel her blood pulse. It pulsed through him like the beat of a drum, driving out the unnatural silver chill. He closed his fingers around hers.

She looked at Morag.

It must have been a signal because abruptly they were back in Gina’s closet. Morag had translocated them. Gina opened her hand to release his, and he had to force his fingers to unlock.

She opened the closet door and dim light filtered into the hallway. It was night on Cape Cod. Electric lighting switched on, yellow and normal, as she walked towards the kitchen.

He followed her, lured less by the thought of food than by an unwillingness to lose her company.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anyone attain clarity of sight. It looked…terrifying. Painful. Do you need a painkiller?”

“I don’t hurt. I feel cold.”

“Cold? Do you want a blanket? I could put a hot water bottle in your bed. A warm drink.” She moved towards the kettle.

“No, nothing.” He scrubbed a hand over his face.

“Morag said you should eat.”

He shrugged. Food didn’t interest him. But she riveted his attention.

Gina frowned. She put the kettle on and took the blueberry pie out of the fridge and cut two large slices, adding dollops of cream. “Eat.” She put a plate in front of the chair he’d sat in earlier. Then she put a hand on his shoulder, urging him to sit.

He groaned.

Two hands on his shoulders, turning him urgently to face her. “What’s wrong?”

“You shouldn’t touch me,” he said.

She removed her hands, instantly.

He swayed forward.

“Lewis!” She put her hands on his chest, supporting him.

He ducked his head, forehead to forehead, not quite touching. “You make me feel alive. The silver light is cold. When you touch me…” His whole body reacted. He suspected Viagra was a limp imitation of the effect of her impersonal touch. He wanted to drown in her. “Warm honey.”

“Pardon?”

“You could melt over me like warm honey. I would like that.”

Her eyes widened. But her hands stayed on his chest.

So close. He could feel her breath on his face.

“Morag didn’t warn me of side effects,” she said.

“The silver light is cold. I went far away. Darkness. Nothingness. I can feel your heat. I can imagine your magic. House witch. I’m in your home. You’re wrapped around me.”

She withdrew her hands. They trembled before she folded her arms. “I’m in front of you.”

He touched his tongue to his lower lip. “I can taste you. Vanilla and rose. Mint and honey. Woman.” He forced himself to step back. “I need to leave.”

“You need to eat and sleep.” Her arms dropped, abandoning defensiveness.

“Away from here.”

She drew a shuddering breath and he couldn’t stop himself looking at how her breasts rose. Her bra concealed the outline of her nipples behind the flimsy barrier of her t-shirt. Her breathing quickened, her breasts rising and falling. He stared like a teenage boy ensnared by hormones. His palms tingled with phantom promise of how her breasts would fill his hands.