Taken

As I focused a flickering oval began to form in the air, waxing and waning. I concentrated, pushing with my will, and the oval solidified into a shape five feet high and two feet wide, big enough for a child to step through or a man to squeeze through. Beyond was a dark room, cold and unlit.

Then Anne’s fingers tightened over mine and I felt a surge of power run through into the focus. The edges of the gate portal shifted in colour from a translucent grey to a soft leaf green and the portal doubled in size, stretching from floor to ceiling.

From out on the balcony I heard the thud of someone landing from a jump. The gunmen were following and we were out of time. I lifted Anne off the bed and rushed for the portal.

This is the dangerous part of a gate spell: maintaining your mental concentration on holding both ends of the spell while also doing the physical work of stepping through. If you mess it up the gate closes while you’re halfway through, with results I’ll leave to your imagination. Anne cried out again as I lifted her, and the power coming from her dimmed. The portal shrank, and for one terrifying moment I was heading for the gate too fast to stop but too slow to make it through. Then Anne recovered, a final surge of power threw the gate out to full size, and we were through. My foot came down on tiles.

As soon as we’d made it the energy pouring through from Anne shut off. The green light flickered and died and the gate winked out behind us, casting the room into pitch-darkness. I couldn’t see, but with my divination magic I don’t need to. I picked out the route through the kitchen in which we’d landed, noticing the futures in which I stumbled over chairs and avoiding them, and guided us blind to the corridor and into the bedroom beyond. I set Anne down on the bed as carefully as I could, then flicked on the light switch. We’d come into a plain room with a deserted guesthouse sort of feel, and the light that made it through the window splashed upon trees and grass before fading into the vast black emptiness of an unlit valley. The only sound was the soft shhhhh of a river outside. We were in the country.

I moved through the house, switching on the heat and lights, before returning to Anne. Lying on the bed she looked very small and very still, her black hair spread out on the pillow like a fan. I looked into the future to see what would happen if I left her and with a horrible sinking sensation realised it had all been for nothing.

Maybe it had been the extra effort of the gate stone; maybe it had been the final shock of moving her that last time, tearing her wounds back open. But whatever reserve Anne had been drawing on to keep herself alive, it had been used up. She was dying. I stood over Anne, looking down at her still form, and felt helpless. With my divination magic there’s so much I can find, so much I can do—but there was nothing I could do about this.

As if she could feel my gaze, Anne’s eyes flickered open. Her breaths were shallow and she had to try twice to speak. “Need . . .”

I crouched next to her. “Need what?”

Reddish-brown eyes looked into mine. There was fear there, and desperation. “Take my . . . hand.”

Anne raised her hand off the bed. I reached for it—

And my precognition screamed a warning. Instantly I sprang back, coming to my feet in the centre of the room, tense and balanced, ready to flee.

Anne’s arm was still reaching out towards me, trembling slightly, then her strength failed and it fell to hang off the side of the bed. Her head was turned towards me and I caught a flash of something that made me stop. Pain, yes, but more than anything she looked ashamed.

“Can’t . . .” Anne’s soft voice was quick and ragged. “Nothing left. Please . . .”

I stared at Anne and saw the choice branching ahead of me. If I stayed where I was Anne’s breaths would come slower and her words would become fainter and soon, in only a few minutes, those red-brown eyes would close and she would die.

But if I took her hand . . .

If I took her hand I’d be struck down by some kind of magical attack, something I’d never seen before. It would be fast as lightning and there wouldn’t be a thing I could do to stop it. In the futures I saw myself crumpling, then blackness.

“Alex . . .” Anne said softly, and her eyes were pleading. “Please . . .”

Every instinct I had was shouting to stay away. It wasn’t as if Anne were my apprentice. I wasn’t responsible for her and it wasn’t my fault she was hurt. And she’d just tried to . . . actually I didn’t know what she’d tried to do. My divination magic can only see what my own senses would perceive, and all I could see down that path was darkness. For all I knew taking her hand would mean we’d both end up dead.

It wasn’t my problem. No one would blame me for leaving her.