Out of the Black - Lee Doty [148]
Alex pushed himself off the floor. The world was still spinning, but he wasn't that interested in the world. He settled back onto his heels, kneeling, focusing- accumulating power. That had gone far better than he could have hoped, but it wasn't over yet.
Focus... he had to focus, but the love kept trying to make him laugh and cry, and the fury kept trying to push all thought from his mind. He'd almost lost Rae.
He didn't want to squelch the emotions, just subdue them enough to think somewhat clearly. He remembered Ivo telling him that the Loom responds to focus and passion. Looking at the patch of night sky through the three walls before him, he had to agree. Right now, he had all the passion he could handle. He had to close his eyes... across the room, Rae's battered face evoked the hottest and darkest feelings.
Shaking with fury, stretched taught with focus, Alex knelt and accumulated power for the next round.
Fortunately, Shiva's shield had mostly held. Her left arm was shattered below the elbow, missing below the forearm. Her suit was ruined. That second toilet she'd blown through must have had a broken flusher. After about twenty seconds, she'd stopped the worst of the bleeding and blocked the most excruciating pain. There was nothing to do about the smell.
Feeling rather put off and looking and smelling much more like crap than she would prefer, Shiva rose into the air. She crossed the street and reentered the ragged two-meter hole in the fifth floor of the Hospital.
No more games. She deeply wished she had the time to really make this hurt. She hated to admit it, but it wasn't time she lacked, it was confidence. The kid had surprised her. The briefing in the whispercraft had said he'd been in the Loom for less than two years, but that simply couldn't be true. Ether Lutine had been an amazing teacher or this kid was the Mozart of the Loom.
She was no longer sure she would be able to win if she kept playing with her prey. This admission was hard on her pride. After four hundred years, she'd thought that she'd be able to handle an unarmed and inexperienced Torpedo, an inexperienced Savant, and two grunt cops. Now it was time to finish this quickly.
She touched down on the floor and moved back through the destroyed bathroom. Water on the destroyed bathroom floor mixed with her blood to complete the destruction of her expensive shoes. The kid tried to bring a part of the building's superstructure down on her, but her shield held. She invoked the Cast of Turbulence. It began to stir the currents of power in the Underworld around the kid and the weave he'd been constructing dissolved as the storm around him intensified.
She'd just moved from scowl to smile when the Underworld seemed to blur around her.
Around Alex, the currents of power grew wild. They tore through his Collection Cast before he could compensate. They tried to buffet him back out of the Underworld, away from the Loom. But too much was riding on this conflict for him to fail. He u the small amount of power he'd already collected to weave a loose Obscuring. He used it to distract the Savant long enough to try an ill-conceived counterattack.
While she was making short work of his Obscuring, he managed to anchor himself to her Turbulence Cast. He used her Cast's order as a shield against the storm it was causing. Then, with no energy left to launch his own counter-Cast, he improvised again. He tunneled through the outer weave of her Cast, patching in a weave of his own. Just as he added the tripwire to her Cast, she cleared his Obscuring. He disengaged from her Cast, hoping she wouldn't notice his work until it was too late.
Shiva swept the child's Obscuring aside. While she'd been distracted, the kid had managed to mostly disable her Turbulence Cast. It was still causing distortions around him, but it was now only an inconvenience. She recalled her crippled Cast back into the Loom,