Page 32 of Autumn L.A.W

Too late.

The darkness hit her like icy water. It flooded up her legs, into her gut, up her spine. Sensation vanished in its wake: first heat, then cold, then just… Gone. For one weightless instant, she was nowhere, and nothing, a hollow outline waiting to be filled.

Then something stepped into her. She heard the entity before she felt it.

At last!

The words weren’t spoken out loud. It bloomed inside her skull, a low male voice reverberating in her throat. The sound of a temple door closing. The echo of footsteps in a burial chamber.

Lioness’s own voice tried to say, no, absolutely not, this is a no-occupancy zone. Her mouth did not cooperate. The hum under her feet settled, and the world rushed back in.

Cal Monroe had seen plenty of weird stuff on the job. He’d seen a guy try to smoke in a burning building. He’d seen a woman refuse to leave her kitchen because she needed “just five more minutes” to finish baking cookies, even as half the apartment complex evacuated around her.

He had not, until today, seen the ground open like a zipper on the world’s worst sleeping bag and vomit up a stone thingy.

He stood up from the bench, very slowly, crumpled coffee cup dangling forgotten from his fingers. Lioness had told him not to look. In fairness, she’d also told him not to investigate anything crawling out of the earth, and he was absolutely planning to obey that part. Unless it glowed.

The air over the taped-off clearing shimmered. Light speared upward from the crack, then folded back in on itself. His firefighter brain tried to categorize it as “smoke column” and gave up when he realized he’d never seen anything like this.

The little circle of witches looked smaller. Rayna braced at the edge of the fissure, hands out, face set. Magda’s bottles leaked colored liquid like a science experiment gone wrong. Victoria’s raccoon had latched onto her collar, fur puffed, tail bushed. Crystal stumbled, one hand planted in the dirt like she needed to hold the park down.

Lioness was at the center, sketchbook abandoned on the ground, hair wild, Spirit Lion blazing beside her in a fading outline and glow.

Cal’s lungs forgot how to function for a second.

Then the light snapped inward, and something dark and wrong slid out of the cracked stone and into Lioness like spilled juice drawn up into a paper towel.

He didn’t see all of it. His brain editing, freezing, then skipping frames the way TV’s occasionally glitched. One moment she was there, sketchbook in hand; the next her knees dipped, her sketchbook dropped, then her body jerked up like she’d been yanked by invisible strings.

“Lioness!” he shouted before he remembered he was supposed to be pretending none of this was happening.

Her head snapped up.

Her eyes had always been green. Different greens, depending on the light, but still human, familiar, alive. Now they were too dark. Like deep, polished onyx.

Cal’s heart dropped into his boots.

“Stay back,” Rayna barked over her shoulder. “Civilian line holds.”

“Too late,” Cal muttered, but he stopped at the tape. His veins rang with the urge to get to Lioness, to haul her out of whatever mess this was and back into boring, understandable danger like a building that had the decency to just be on fire. Something he could deal with.

Lioness straightened again. The way she moved was wrong. Normally, she fidgeted slightly even standing still. Now she rose in one smooth, deliberate line, vertebra by vertebra stretching, until she stood motionless, shoulders squared, chin lifted.

Spirit Lion shrank back a pace, hackles high, ears flattened. A growl rolled out of him that made Cal’s skin ripple.

“Lioness?” Magda’s voice was soft but shaking. “Sweetheart?”

Lioness turned toward her. “What?” It was her voice. And then it wasn’t. “At last,” she said, but the words came out lower, resonant, relieved. Her vocal cords produced them, but something sounded like dragging syllables over stone.

“Who are you?” Rayna demanded.

“I have no name that your mouths would carry well,” the thing wearing her said. “I was guardian. I was sword. I was the boundary between pharaoh and all who would profane his rest.”

The words vibrated the air. Cal’s stomach rolled.

Brianna moved back half a step. “Okay, so, quick poll, is this a friendly guardian or a ‘rip your face off for looking at my tomb funny’ guardian?”

“Brianna,” Rayna hissed.