“You first,” I said, yanking a wad of ever-after into me. My breath came in with a sharp sound. Ivy stiffened in my grip, and I wondered if she felt it as I pulled everything I could handle into me. “Jenks, grab something!” I shouted as the building energy crested, lapped the top of my abilities, and, with a spasm that seemed to shake me to my core, edged into pain as I took even more. I had to take it all. All.

“Rache!” Jenks shrilled, tugging on my hair as he wound himself up in it. “What are you doing?”

I had one shot, and I wasn’t going to waste it, even if it burned my synapses to a twisted mass. “Corrumpto!” I shouted, letting the energy explode from me.

My knees buckled. I felt airy, light and unreal. The line hummed through me, smelling of ozone and stardust. A soundless wave sped out, flattening the grass and bowling the vampires head over heels, making them look like crows. Ivy shuddered, her eyes opening black and deep. Together we straightened as a distant bell rang, and then another. Across the river, the basilica’s bells tolled, and tears threatened when I recognized my own church bells ringing an echo from the force of my blast.

My skin was tingling, and I almost went down as Ivy’s weight suddenly became my responsibility. “Ivy!” I called, bringing up my second sight and looking for the ley line. The vampires were down. We had to move. “Come on! Just a few steps!”

But then panic took me, not that the head vampire was getting up off the pavement, but that the ley line was gone! It wasn’t running where it should, through the man-made ponds and beside the statue the vampire was leaning heavily against.

“Where is it?” I shouted, and Ivy sagged in my grip. Bewildered, and head humming as if it held a hive of bees, I strengthened my second sight until reality wavered under a broken landscape of dust, cracked rock, and bloated sun hazing an empty landscape and dry riverbed. The desolation of the ever-after was complete, and the gritty wind lifted through my hair even though I still stood in reality. But there was no line. What have I done?

Jenks hovered before me, blinking in shock. “You’re in it,” he said, a weird greenish dust sifting from him. “How did you move it, Rache?”

My mouth dropped open, and I spun, shocked. I moved the line? How?

“Get her!” the vampire screamed, and the present rushed back.

“Rhombus!” I shouted, staggering under Ivy’s weight as my circle sprang up heady and thick since I was standing right in the middle of the line. I’d moved it? How? I had only tapped it. But Jenks was right. I was standing in Al’s flimsy line, and it was growing stronger, no longer dampened and drained by the ponds. I’d shifted it. I had moved it to me.

The vampires slid to a halt, one of them screaming as he touched the circle and a snap of energy struck him like lightning. We were in the line. Ivy was with me. I looked past the angry vampires, knowing the line had been behind them, knowing it couldn’t be moved. But it had.