The Bleed: Book 2: RAPTURE David Moody (the red fox clan txt) 📖

outstretched, palms facing upward, and her hair was blowing from a non-existent breeze. A deep blue color began to mix in with the red, creating a vibrant purple. “I feel her!” she shouted. The image on the screen began to gain clarity. “I’m trying to connect us….” Sam was straining as she exerted power.

Thistle watched as a purple sphere, no bigger than a child’s marble, began to form in front of Maddie. It was many long seconds later when she reacted to it, first stepping away then closer, then tentatively reaching a finger toward it.

“Thistle, gonna…need some help.” Sweat was running down Sam’s back, her body was thrumming from the current coursing through it.

Thistle added her flow to Sam’s. The sphere grew larger, but not big enough.

“Sam, I don’t know how much longer I can do this!” Thistle was out of breath, as if she’d run for miles.

Sam’s legs were growing weak, to the point she was fearful she was going to collapse. “Maddie, fucking help us!” Sam shouted.

An elongated echo of Sam’s words played back on the monitor like distorted feedback. To Sam and Thistle, Maddie was moving excruciatingly slowly as she began to manipulate the portal on her side. Sam cried out when her left leg locked up, if she bent it, she knew the muscles in her thigh would create a charley horse that might rip it free from its moorings.

“Don’t stop!” she begged when Thistle looked as if she were going to come over and help. Intrinsically she knew this was their one shot to pull Maddie back from the purgatory they’d sent her to. Somehow they’d been given a lifeline to her, but if they didn’t use it now, she would be adrift forever.

Maddie manipulated the magic on her end, making it more stable, pulling on the edges to enlarge it. She could feel the wavering power as the two women on the other end were beginning to flag. Her heart was beating so quickly it was almost one continuous strum. It wasn’t as big as she would have preferred, but time was of the essence. Maddie backed up to get a running start. She ran toward the opening and leaped with her arms extended out before her. There was an interminable amount of time where she had no sense of what was going on. She could not see, hear or feel anything. She might as well have been inside a suspension tank, as she didn’t even believe she was moving. If this was her life now, she would have preferred to have been back on the dead world. Then came the most minute hint of light.

“I’m dead. Just fucking great. Heading like a snail with a broken foot toward the light to a being I gave a royal bitch slap to and whom I don’t even believe in anyway. This ought to go well.” As she thought upon what she would say in her defense, the blackness immediately turned to an all-encompassing white and she found herself sliding along a slick tile floor before she crashed sideways into a wall.

“Maddie!” Sam cried out in relief.

“Sandra,” Thistle said warily.

Maddie wanted to tell them she thought she had found help, but something was wrong with Sandra, even more so than usual. What she had to say would have to wait.

25

LONDON

Arridon came to on the cold, hard floor of a cathedralesque room. Columns of stone soared to a ceiling multiple stories above with windows that pierced the cloudy sky. The quiet hum of magic and machinery enveloped him. There was no water, no cave, and no Thistle.

He sat up, his heart beating rapidly from fear and worry.

“Thistle? Thistle?!” he hollered. His voice echoed back to him, hollow, and as fearful sounding as he felt. Arridon got to his feet and searched the room; he found no signs of his sister.

“How do you just vanish?” he mumbled.

On one wall of the room a solid steel rectangle sat recessed. A line split the polished metal in half, and on the wall nearby, Arridon saw a small panel with a single round button.

“An elevator. If she left here, she went in that.”

Arridon strode with purpose to the button and pressed it. The door responded as if it had spent its entire existence waiting for him to just that. It slid open with no delay, and he stepped inside. After examining the panel filled with a hundred numbered buttons, Arridon pushed the one marked L, for Lobby. The door hissed shut, and he felt an abrupt wave of queasiness come over him as his descent began. The feeling passed as the numbers on the flat, god-tech screen changed with rapidity. The moment his breath had simmered down to normal, the sensation returned, and the numbers stopped moving. The door slid open, revealing a strange scene.

Ten feet of worn stone floor terminated in a railing that overlooked a massive open space, the floor far below teaming with people wearing strange clothing, speaking strange languages and moving left to right. In just the few seconds Arridon stood there, several had pushed their way into the elevator he’d arrived in, tapping on buttons to take them skyward. As the door started to close, he slid sideways out onto the platform, pushing strangers aside. They paid him no heed in their haste to get somewhere.

Arridon walked to the transparent railing and looked down into the foyer of the huge structure. Glass walls—some broken, and all dirty—surrounded the whole space, and an entirely new crowd of people buzzed about. She wasn’t here. She’d never go into that crowd on her own.

Arridon picked his way through the throng, minding the weight of his mother’s pistol in his waistband and any prying hands that might try to take it from him. He got the moving stairway heading down and allowed it to transport him to the lower level. He held onto the handrail with a firm grip to steady himself. He stepped out