“You see, skipping,” Marsden said happily.
I didn’t say anything; I was afraid I was going to throw up.
We left the purple line at the bottom of a bank of cliffs, twisting and tumbling through a very startled flock of seagulls and the smoking spray of waves, before merging with a bright blue line. That one headed straight inland—thank God—and Marsden patted my leg. “Almost there now.”
“Almost where?” I croaked as we leapt into thin air yet again.
I gazed dazedly at a rolling patchwork of yellow fields, and then we were dropping back into a silver-white ocean of the Belinus Line. But this time it was broken by the presence of a large dark mass extending almost completely across. “Barrier,” Pritkin said a little shrilly.
“Yes, thank you, John,” Marsden said, and spun the wheel. The car hit the side of the line, swooped up the side, and turned completely upside down. We skinned past the top of the barrier with maybe an inch to spare, and then we were rushing down the other side of the line, completing a graceful swoop that had my hands shaking and my stomach reeling. The barrier dissolved behind us as the mages hurried to catch up.
“How did they know we’d come back?” Pritkin asked as we hurtled ahead.
“One of them must be a racer,” Marsden said, looking irritated. “I laid out that course myself some years ago, and a number of the young hopefuls are known to practice on it. I should have taken an alternate route, but not to worry. We’ll lose them soon enough.”
He pointed ahead. I turned from watching our pursuers and a wash of color exploded across my vision. A firestorm of light boiled ahead, like a curtain of fire stretched across the entire center of the line. It was almost impossible to look directly at it. The power surges threatened to sear my retinas, the glow leaking in even through the hand I had thrown over my eyes.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” Pritkin said.
“A shortcut?” Why didn’t I like the sound of that?
“Yes. Try to relax, Cassie,” Marsden advised. I stared at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. Because despite the fact that he was gearing down, we appeared to be picking up speed as whatever that was pulled us in. And Marsden wasn’t trying to avoid it, I realized; he’d cut back on his suicidal pace only to better handle the wicked currents being churned up by that thing.
“What is that?”
“A minor vortex,” Pritkin informed me. He sounded tense.
“Minor?” The thing looked like a supernova. And then a more important thought intruded. “Wait. We’re going in there?”
“Oh, no. That would kill us,” Marsden said calmly. And then the phenomenon grabbed us and we were hurtling forward at what had to be a couple hundred miles an hour.
I screamed and grabbed Pritkin, who was trying to fire off spells even as we bucked and twisted and slingshotted around the outer edge of the phenomenon and then—
Dead calm. For a moment, we hung alongside the electric white hub of the vortex, energy pulsing around us like the heartbeat of some giant beast. And the next we were somewhere else entirely.
I’d had a shift go bad before, had the weight of time pressing down on me, stretching me, until it felt like my body spanned the width of the planet. This was nothing like that. There was no gravity pulling on me, no bones and cells warping, no anything. It was almost like being back inside the Shroud, except that that had just caused sensory deprivation. This was having no senses to deprive.
I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to overtake me, but I couldn’t even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, hear something, but if I had a hand it didn’t connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead—that something had gone terribly wrong and we would be left here, drowning in nothingness, forever.
Until I slammed back into the seat. I couldn’t complain of a lack of sensation now. In an instant, I went from having no secure casing of flesh and bone to a body made of pain. It was everywhere, from my throbbing head to my bruised butt to the sharp pain radiating up from my lap where the seat belt was doing its best to cut me in two.
But the pain wasn’t the main problem. I stared up in blank terror at a thousand lines of power crisscrossing all around us: vibrant greens and glowing golds, cold blues and rich silver, flowing ebony and shuddering, bloody reds. I could have traced the lines just as easily blind: the bronze clanging like a bell, the blue murmuring like a stream, the purple crackling like lightning, the reds screaming.
“We hopped over to Glastonbury Tor,” Pritkin explained, looking a little pale. “The biggest vortex in Britain.”
“Hopped?”
“For short trips, you take a ley line,” Marsden said. “If one happens to be running where you want to go. For longer ones, you take a line to the nearest major vortex. All vortexes around the world are interconnected on the metaphysical plane, you see, with currents flowing between them. If you catch the right one, you can hop from one vortex to another.”
I shook my head numbly.
“There is no space here,” he said, trying again, “Only energy. Therefore distance is meaningless.”
I stared around in awe at the streams of power running all around us, each threading through the middle of the massive vortex. This close, it was like a giant heart, the ley lines running in and out of it like brightly colored veins, energy pulsing around us with every strobing beat. Everywhere I looked, colors melted together, shimmering off everything, painting the car in a dozen hues. It looked like we were swimming in rainbow water.
If a small ley line sink could power MAGIC, what could something like this do? “Why doesn’t somebody harvest all this energy?” I asked wonderingly. “It could power . . . everything.”
“Every generation has those who try,” Marsden replied. “But no shield we’ve ever created can withstand the forces inside even a small vortex.” He looked me over critically. “Have you recovered? Because I am afraid we have another jump ahead of us.”