Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5)(92)

“See,” we said.

Emmett let out a keening sound. The mirror repeated the noise, the wail rising until I thought my eardrums would burst.

The reflection of Emmett, gray-eyed, dark-suited executive shattered into two, then three, then tens, then hundreds. Those images began to change, disintegrating from Emmett into figures of people, so many people.

His victims, I realized. Every single being he’d stolen from since he’d decided to become the greatest mage in all the world.

I saw them, from simplest apprentice to adept mage like the one I’d watched him battle this summer. I saw Gabrielle, then Drake, and then Cassandra at the end of the line of victims, the last he’d siphoned from today.

The mirror showed me all. They stood, some alive and broken, some obviously dead, their shades looking back at Emmett and making me shiver.

“You reap what you sow, Emmett,” I said in my double voice. “And now today, you’ll pay.”

Mick and Cassandra still bound Emmett, so the two Janets put our hands on the mirror and slid every bit of magic we had into it.

“Return,” we said.

“No!” Emmett’s nose began to stream blood, his terror coming at me through the glass.

I held on, relentless. Magic began to pour out of Emmett as fast as the blood, diving into the mirror and then reflecting, not into the hundreds of mages as I’d supposed, but into me.

The rush of it sent me off the ground toward the peeled-back, ruined tin ceiling. I grabbed the frame of the mirror and hung on.

All the magics poured into me, beginning with what he’d managed to pull from Cassandra, Drake, and Gabrielle, to a water mage who’d gotten in his way a few days ago, to more and more mages down the years.

He’d taken from all—witches, demons, shamans, Changers, Nightwalkers, skinwalkers—every single magical person he could best, Emmett had robbed. He was the Ununculous because he’d defeated the last mage who’d called himself that, and I drew the collected magics of that Ununculous into me as well.

All these, plus the power of the magic mirror and the original powers of Emmett himself—fairly strong earth magic—now became part of me.

I no longer had to hold on to the mirror to use its magics. My disparate bodies floated upward then slid together and became one.

Emmett, crying, sank to the floor. Blood poured from his nose, and he weakly tried to mop it up with a wad of tissue he’d pulled from his pocket.

He was no longer the slick executive Emmett, nor was he the scary walking-dead Emmett. He was an ordinary looking man with a body running to fat, hair thinning on top, and eyes of indeterminate hazel, blinking behind thick-lensed glasses. He was more ordinary looking even than Fremont Hansen, whose kindhearted and affable personality made him well-liked and unique.

Emmett was a nobody. A man so nondescript no one noticed him, and he likely didn’t have the personality to compensate. And so he’d enhanced the magic inside him and learned to steal from others to remake himself and get back at the world.

All that magic was now inside me. I had knowledge of ages and the cosmos, of magic and chemistry, folklore and true history. It filled me, that knowledge, artistry, and skill, and made me laugh.

“So much for Emmett Smith,” I announced, while Cassandra and Pamela watched me, open-mouthed. Mick had at some point shifted back from dragon, and now he stood in the doorway of the burned-out kitchen, my delectable man of fire.

“So much for the Ununculous,” I said, carrying on my theme. I rose on a cushion of air. “He messed with the wrong mage, one with a magic mirror. Poor Emmett. Now I am the Ununculous.”

I put out my hand, and changed the world.





Chapter Twenty-Nine

My reach extended all the way to Magellan, and I could see the little town in my mind’s eye. It was an ordinary community in this part of the Southwest, small but close-knit, people supplementing the goods they could find at local businesses with trips to Flag or Phoenix on the weekends. The Native Americans who lived here or came here to work were comfortably close to their families in the Indian nations that surrounded the area.

I could do anything to these people, and I could do anything for these people.

First, I gave everyone sleeping happy dreams. I gave a young woman in the vast Medina clan who’d been debating leaving home the knowledge that she could seek her fortune in the cities and still find a place with her family in Magellan. I assured one of the Salases that asking the woman of his dreams to marry him would result in a fine life together.

I moved my knowledge into the home of Jamison Kee and Naomi Hansen, found Julie lying awake in her bedroom, and made her deafness go away. It was so easy, the manipulation of bones and nerves of the ear canal, so simple to make them work properly again. Why had no one else done this?