Where Darkness Falls
an excerpt

Tatiana was still in the lead, walking at a good pace, when Micawber’s form vanished, and with it all sense of his presence. She didn’t have time to stop: one step later she hit something that felt like walking into an invisible electric fence. Sickening pain and pressure shot up from the base of her spine to the crown of her skull; she jerked back and sat down hard, her right hand automatically going to the top of her head in search of the blood she was sure must be fountaining out of the top of her skull. Her hair was dry, but there was a red haze behind her eyes and beyond that, a moonlit night that was much darker than it had been a second before. Her Manifestation of Bast had been knocked right out of her body.

A hand caught her under her left upper arm. “What is it?”

“Ward.” Her voice felt like cotton wool on her tongue, and her stomach did a slow rollover. How the hell could a Level Six sniffer have missed such a massive energy shield? “Micawber?”

She didn’t really expect an answer, and none came. Her connection with the big brown tom had vanished along with her Manifestation.

Anderson pulled up on her arm, but she set her heels into the ground and pushed herself back a couple of feet first, sliding on her ass before letting him help her to her feet -- the last thing she wanted was to brush against that ward again. She turned her back to it, glaring at her fellow agent, who was now just a slightly more solid shape in the darkness under the trees. “How the hell did you miss that?”

“There is no ward.” He stepped past her on the trail, reaching out; as he extended his arm, approaching the spot where Tatiana had fallen, a bright golden glow sprang into existence around his entire body, leaving only his face bare. Clad in the Armor of God, he said: “I see no --”

His hand went past the space that Tatiana’s chest had occupied only seconds earlier. The glow went out like a snuffed candle, and he stopped dead, his back stiffening even further, if such a thing were possible.

Then, as Tatiana watched in disbelief, he actually started walking forward. He went five slow paces up the trail, his hand still outstretched. At the fifth step he made a little snorting noise and swayed; for an instant she thought that his legs were actually going to give way, leaving him stranded within the deadly zone of the ward. Then he started moving backward considerably faster than he had entered, until he was out of the ward and still standing with his back to her. He brought the hand that had been outstretched to his face, then took it away to look at it. There was something black on his fingertips. Tatiana didn’t need acute night vision to know that it was blood.

At last he turned back to her. There was a small trickle of blood coming from his left nostril, and his eyes were wide, but within a few seconds he had his surprise under control. “That is... extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary?” Her head was a drum tower, but now the pounding of the headache was joined by the sharper stacatto pulse of fury. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

“Analyzing the phenomenon.”

“Ana -- right. Analyzing. You analyze it, and then pop a blood vessel in your brain and drop dead, leaving me out here in the middle of nowhere with no backup and Goddess knows what else out there. Oh, and because you were glowing like a spotlight, whatever-it-is now knows we’re here and knows exactly where to find us.” Her stomach rolled again and she bent to brace her hands on her knees, fighting the urge to vomit.

“We need to chart the boundaries of this field.”

Through clenched teeth, Tatiana managed: “Not in the dark. My Manifestation was knocked out.”

“Then we must withdraw to a safer position.” She couldn’t see him with her head down, and wouldn’t have seen much in the darkness even if she were looking at him, but there was a slight quaver in his controlled voice that suggested that he was also about to vomit.

She held up one hand in the universal sign for Give me a minute here. Then she counted to twenty. By the time she was done she hadn’t thrown up and the clenching under her diaphram had eased to the point where she felt that she could straighten up and walk without losing everything on her stomach. “Agreed. Let me try to Manifest...”

Hands still on her knees and head still bowed, she reached for the energy of the Goddess. Instead of the ease of reaching for a familiar object in a well-known room, it felt like stumbling in a dark and empty space, arms blindly outstretched. What in the name of the Goddess WAS that thing, if it wasn’t a ward?

At last she shook her head and straightened. “Nothing.”

“I’m not surprised. What you ran into is not a ward -- in fact, if anything it is the opposite. A ward is a field of positive energy. That is a field of null energy, by definition impossible for even a skilled Manifester to detect.” He had pulled out his GPS device and was keying something into it -- no doubt marking the precise coordinates of the field, so that when they came back tomorrow they wouldn’t run into it again.

“Null energy? That’s impossible. No such thing exists.”

“I would have said so as well. I’ve never encountered anything like it before.”

“Is --” A wave of cold dread cut through the fevered throbbing in her head for an instant. “Is my ability to Manifest... damaged? Permanently?”

Anderson shrugged slightly. “Highly unlikely. You’ve just had a bad shock. If you can get your emotions under control you should be able to access your abilities.”

She heard his last sentence with an increasing sense of disbelief. “Excuse me?”

He spoke a little more slowly: “I understand that as a woman you’re more susceptible to being thrown off-balance. I’ll take care of you until you’re able to function again.”

“You...” There were so many things wrong with his earnest statement that for a moment Tatiana was rendered speechless. She stared as Anderson came toward her, moved behind her, and started searching through the outer pockets of her backpack. After a few seconds he made a small satisfied sound and pulled something free. A small click, and an elongated circle of light illuminated the trail going back the way they’d come. “Put that out!”

“As you said -- my Armor has already informed anyone who might be watching of our presence.” He gestured with the flashlight. “I suggest that we withdraw approximately two hundred yards --”

“And I suggest that you worry about yourself, Agent Anderson.” She moved around behind him and returned the favor, emerging with her own lit flashlight, and started up the trail without looking back. “After all, as you yourself said, you have no wilderness craft. I do, and if something happens to me, you’ll literally be a babe in the woods.”

Walking back with a pounding head and a sick stomach, she found herself thinking of the clear glimpse she’d caught of Anderson’s face, illuminated by the glare of her flashlight as she passed him. The trickle of blood from his nose wasn’t running any longer, and it was slightly smeared at the bottom where he’d run his fingertips across it. His pale skin had looked almost transparent, with dark circles under his eyes. Obviously walking into the null field had cost him dearly, but he’d kept the stiff-upper-lip act going regardless. To her amazement, she found herself actually concerned about his wellbeing in a way that didn’t have much to do with having a necessary backup in hostile territory.

Oh, Great Mother, don’t let me become attracted to this man! But closer examination of her emotions revealed not a trace of sexual interest: in fact, if anything, there was a negative quality in that respect, a null field instead of a ward, if you will. No, she just felt sympathy for his suffering, although he seemed to have precious little for her own, and what he did have was of a distinctly sexist variety.

She put the thought out of her mind for the moment. Anderson was right: No attack on them had been forthcoming in spite of his grandstanding, which suggested that they were indeed out here alone. That meant that two hundred yards should be more than enough distance between themselves and the null field. Just to make her point clear, she led them quite a bit further before calling a halt in a small clearing just off the trail -- a place where she could see the full moon.

“We’ll get a small fire going and then I’ll uplink to the Temple and update them on our status.” She walked to the southern treeline of the clearing and unslung her backpack, putting it down against the foot of one of the trees. Now that there was moonlight to see by she felt considerably more secure, both because she could see things coming and because it was the celestial symbol of her Goddess. “I don’t suppose you know how to start a fire?”

“I do not.” Anderson unslung his own pack against a fallen treetrunk about ten feet from Tatiana’s, in the clearing itself.

“Well, you don’t need to. Just go and gather up some fallen branches -- twigs and pieces of wood as long as your forearm. Get them as dry as you can find them. I’ll tell you when you’ve brought enough.”

Almost visibly gritting his teeth, Anderson went to fulfill the task he had been given.