Lycan Legacy - Paladin: Tales of Luna White - Werewolf Veronica Singer (children's ebooks online txt) 📖

“Inside. I need you close. Under no circumstances are you to step outside of the circle. The consequences would be dire.”

Instead of asking about the consequences or reconsidering, Mike asked, “Can I shoot through the circle?”

“You can shoot out, but remember, bullets can cross the circle both ways.”

I stood close to Mike and held my arms out. “Time for a good luck hug before I start.”

Mike hesitated. “You think your wolf side will attack me?”

“No, Mike. I just want a hug before I risk this conjuration.” Was I asking too much? “I might not come back from this. I want a hug in case I don’t.”

Mike moved into my arms and hugged me tightly. He buried his nose in my hair and breathed. “You will come back. You always come back. And I’ll always be waiting for you.”

32

Enclosed in a circle wrought of magic and anointed with werewolf blood, with the mightiest human warrior ever to walk the Earth at my back and my werewolf self in attendance, I descended into a trance.

At first, I used the senses I had honed at our oasis—the ones I had used to find water deep below the surface and bring it to up.

But that was too short-range for my needs. I needed something more powerful, more universal than my direct perceptions.

Tracing ley lines wouldn’t go deep enough. Echolocation using magical pulses faded away after a few hundred feet through the earth.

Earth magnetism might work, but channeling that much magnetism would fry Mike and me like hamsters in a microwave.

I needed to use a different force. Something pervasive, that didn’t interact much with matter, allowing it to penetrate deep into the earth.

Gravity would be perfect. Could I sense gravity? Even powerful magicians couldn’t affect this universal constant. At least, no magicians I had ever met. There was always the possibility that someone out there was more talented than Mason or me.

Hell, most magicians couldn’t even feel the infinitesimal tugs of gravity.

But Luna the werewolf had a resource most magicians could never use: an intimate connection with the moon.

I opened my senses to the moon on the magical plane, which gave me a way to interact with the moon on the physical plane.

Casting with this newfound sense was like using my hands to feel my way through a lightless cavern. I stumbled forward, careful to maintain a thread of life back to my body on the surface.

There you are. The feeling was strange, like putting a hand into a stream of water to feel the direction and force of the flow. I followed my hand, trying to dive into the Earth.

But the Earth rejected me. It was like trying to dive into wet cement, impossible to push through.

I flashed back to my recent experience of diving with a supercavitating shield around my body.

Oh, that was a good idea. I wrapped a shield of spirit around my astral form the same way I had wrapped air around my body on the physical plane.

Much better. Now my spirit-sheathed astral form could swim through the depths of the Earth with the same ease I had felt in the Persian Gulf.

But my spirit form was tiny. My physical form had been tiny compared to waters of the Gulf; my spirit form was minuscule compared to the size of the Earth. There was no way I could flounder around here and find what I needed to find. My spirit was insignificant in this scale.

My heart clutched in despair at the impossibility of this mad plan to affect the vast pools of oil in this country.

My wolf side snapped at my ass. A series of images flashed through my head: me, normal-sized and standing on the ground. The image pulling away, farther and farther, until the Luna image was tiny.

Yeah, I know I’m too small to do much…

Then the tiny Luna silhouette grew enormous as the viewpoint continued to recede. Luna grew, taller than the tallest tree, larger than the largest building, larger than the largest mountain.

It hit me suddenly. In the astral plane, size was a matter of opinion and could be changed by force of will.

Five miles tall and bursting with energy, I dove into the Earth.

Swimming through sandstone, granite, and stone was like flying through the clouds in the sky, only each ‘cloud’ had a different flavor, letting me know what it was made of.

New sensations—some human, some wolf, some magician, some inexpressible—flowed through me. So that was what granite tasted like!

I sniffed and followed the scent of oil to find large pools gathered under the country. I pushed immaterial hands against these pools to move them. My fingers swept through them as if they were clouds in the sky.

Big imagination, little power on this level. Even though I had found a way to sense various elements under the earth, I still only had a human-sized magician’s ability to affect the elements.

I backpedaled and looked at the oil deposits again. There was something strange. The oil was pooled in a pattern that didn’t make sense. Impermeable layers of sediment kept the pools of oil in place. But there was something wrong about the sediment. Natural forces shouldn’t have caused the layers to gather in those places.

It was like staring at a stage magician’s levitation trick. Some were so clever that they seemed impossible, like true magic. But a trained magician can usually see through the subterfuge and figure the trick out.

There it was! A pattern of forces that held the layers in place, concentrating it here instead of where it should be—forces much too large for me to affect. I could push against them, like an ant against a fifty-ton boulder, but they wouldn’t budge. One plane of force rested on another, which rested on another, until…

Down and down and down I went, tracing the forces. They were stacked like a Jenga puzzle, one supporting another until, deep beneath the earth, sat a tiny sliver of force. My ant-sized strength couldn’t move the fifty-ton