Excerpt

Chapter 1

When Verity and Dakota approached the small park, Verity spotted three mantas immediately. To Verity's eyes, as a creature of the mirror realm herself, the mantas looked like spun glass, shimmering like liquid in the middle and refracting into rainbows at the edges. One manta spotted them and left the floating group to bank in their direction. It swerved off at the last moment, the tips of its long, flat wings rippling in a way that evoked the ocean-going animal it had been nicknamed for.

"Three," Verity called after Dakota as the woman jogged for the edge of the park where lawn met sidewalk along the road. They'd found a good location for this hunt: a patch of tall, urban forest abutted the park on two sides, and the back of a library formed the third, leaving only the sidewalk for Dakota to block off with an illusion.

The lazy orange cast to the sunlight, this late in the day, made Dakota look especially golden. It wasn't just the tint of her hair, but the confidence of her movements as she lifted one hand in acknowledgment of Verity's count. She paced along the concrete, dragging the glow of an illusion spell behind her. It would show caution tape, or something similar, Verity assumed, to keep people out as well as hiding the coming light show.

Verity planted herself on the lawn near the library and did a quick scan for innocent bystanders as Dakota worked. No one so far, after the library's closing time and in the middle of the dinner hour on a chill fall day. Good. Mantas could kill a human, in theory, if they caught one sufficiently unaware. The mantas who made it through to this realm tended to only bumble around, disoriented, and Dakota was paid to hunt them mostly to prevent panic from people encountering invisible monsters, but it never hurt to be careful.

The group of three mantas roiled as three more zipped in from the trees to join them. Six? There couldn't possibly be that many. In the mirror realm, the mantas traveled in flocks of up to ten, but only a few could slip through the boundary between realms at any time. Before tonight, the most Dakota had ever fought at once had been three. The anxious movement of the flock kept increasing until one broke free and buzzed right for Dakota's head as she returned from setting the illusion.

Her reactions were good enough that she sensed something was wrong and ducked what was to her an invisible presence before Verity finished shouting her warning. Dakota jerked out her modified paintball pistol as the manta swerved off. She settled into a looser stance, paintball pistol up, ready to burst into motion at the right moment.

When the manta curved back around toward her, she shot, missing it by only a narrow margin. The creature's dodge dipped it into a beam of the day's last sunlight that lanced between the shadows of two great evergreens. The light caught the manta, refracting into a flash visible even to human eyes. Dakota nailed the creature with a blue splotch square on the centerline of its body. The electricity spell bound to the paintball exploded with an audible pop and a singed smell. The manta dropped. One down.

Verity tucked her hands into the pockets of her hand-me-down fleece jacket and returned to her regular hunt role, keeping half an eye on the mantas, and another half out for approaching bystanders. Maybe she could convince Dakota to let her teleport them home after this hunt. It would save time, after all. None of the new team members Dakota had been accumulating lately could offer anything like it, either.

And the binding spell that kept her human, kept her under Dakota's control—however reluctant that control was—would shred just a tiny bit more in the act of teleporting. Verity glanced sideways at the library building. With the sun so low, one of the windows might provide the flawless reflection she needed.

She shouldn't let herself get distracted, though. Verity refocused on the mantas, which were twisting in an even tighter knot. Not only were there too many, but they were behaving strangely. They should have been floating in lazy arcs, senses disrupted by being outside the mirror realm. They'd adjust eventually, but the process took days for less intelligent monsters. These ones seemed riled up. Frightened?

Dakota brought an explosion spell into being in her hand. She tossed it up, and the bodies of the three closest mantas exploded briefly with bluish light, like shining a bright beam into a faceted crystal. Dakota squeezed off shots as fast as she could, trying to tag each one with paint even if she couldn't get the electricity burst central enough to drop them. Three went down in succession, and Verity called out to confirm the kills.

Shimmering movement in the trees caught Verity's attention. She shifted her position to try to get a better angle on it. Had she lost track of one of the mantas? No, four on the ground, two in the air. But there was something there.

Verity broke into a run toward the trees. A jogging path revealed itself fully between two bushes as she approached it straight on. A woman, dressed in the blinding colors of fashionable athletic-wear, folded silently to the ground. A manta was spread across her face and upper body, another at her side, fouling whatever instinctive defense she might have attempted with her arms.

"No—" Verity wasn't sure why she shouted. The human couldn't hear her. The woman's brain was dark, the manta having eaten her living electricity even if she could have come back from the suffocation. But that wasn't right. In the mirror realm, mantas were a danger to those of her people who slept outdoors without precautions, but if one attacked you while you were aware, you could generally fight it off.

Then again, attacked by an invisible monster she didn't know existed, the human wouldn't have been very aware, Verity realized with a sick feeling.

Dakota whirled when Verity yelled and arrived a few steps behind her. The manta on the human's side took to the air, but Dakota shot the manta on the woman's face before it could rise off its prey, twice, three times. She fell to her knees and hauled the limp corpse off, pounded the woman's chest in a motion Verity vaguely recognized from television. Something to do with the heart, but of course the heart wasn't the problem. "Dakota, she's dead, you have to—"

Dakota gasped something inarticulately negative. Verity hauled at Dakota's shoulder, but the woman was apparently too much in shock to hear her. She kept pounding.

Verity fumbled out her own paintball gun from the back of her jeans and pointed it at the roiling flock as a whole. If only she wasn't such a terrible shot, hadn't relied on Dakota so much. She whistled a keep-away call, as she would have done at home. Rather than scattering them, it only seemed to rile the mantas more. They swerved away, gathered themselves, then bore down on her and Dakota.

Verity tried to steady her breathing, failed, and aimed as best she could. One, two, three shots in close succession and none of them hit. She didn't have enough time to aim, she didn't have enough paintballs to not aim. She could do this. She'd practiced with Dakota before, for the hell of it. Another shot—there, a wing. And then the mantas were on top of her and she had no more time.

Forget breathing. She emptied the rest of the clip, two for each manta. She aimed, hoped against hope at least one of the two paintballs had hit, and aimed at the next. And the three mantas fell and she realized she'd been holding her breath only when her next inhalation made it mostly possible to think again.

Verity stomped each manta several times to make sure they didn't move. Silvery blood from her bootprints on the fragile wings oozed out into liquid-metallic pools between grass blades still wet from the day's earlier drizzle. If only she hadn't been bound human, she'd have consumed their lifeforce to make sure they were fully gone. But who knew what the electricity that powered a creature's neurons would taste like after being zapped, anyway.