Page 150 of Vampire's Choice
What if they do?
Well, then they’ll leave some kind of counterspell or trap to annihilate him. You won’t even know what hit you.
Terrific. But back down she went. Being underwater put an unpleasant pressure on her chest, much like traveling with Merc at supersonic speeds. But she could handle it. Thanks to the spell, the container was wrapped in a faint blue light. She cautiously moved around it, staying clear of that defense field. Had the container been dropped here under the cover of darkness weeks ago, carried by a passing freighter? Had it been made ready for its prisoner then, well outside the sanctuary’s detection perimeter?
Clara had suffered from the Trad visions long enough for that to be plausible. They’d spent time setting this all up.
Ruth picked up a piece of concrete and tossed it at the binding. It jittered upon contact, became the same blue for a blink, then floated unevenly down to the murky bottom.
Could balanced energy become unbalanced? Like putting water into a cup, and then tipping it until the weight inside took it all the way over?
Pumping her arms and kicking her legs with purpose, she scoured the coral reef and found what she was looking for. A bar of steel, crusted with barnacles, but solid, and long enough to keep her just out of range of the spellcraft preventing a powerful vampire’s escape.
She wasn’t as strong as a lot of vampires, but with the right leverage, she could do this. Don’t be afraid to use tools, daughter.
Mal’s advice, when teaching her to fortify her strength.
Plunging the bar into the sand beneath the container, she shoved it in, then jumped back as it made contact. A slight vibration went through the bar, but the blue light stayed around the freighter. Her lever wasn’t electrified or hammered out of shape. She closed back in and pushed the end further beneath the container, then pulled down on it.
Her muscles groaned in complaint, but the container shifted. Triumph surged as she saw the energy vibrate, like water in a cup, showing it had been disturbed.
As the pounding continued inside the container, she left that bar in place, and moved to examine the door latch, without reaching out to touch it.
There will be an anchor point, where the magic will be arranged in the pattern needed to keep it running…
The door would make sense, right? She considered ways to test it and went in search of another steel bar. A shorter one that she bent into a hook at one end.
Returning to the door latch, she braced herself, then shoved the bar behind the latch, driving the hook down upon it in the same motion.
She hadn’t let go fast enough, getting a fierce zap for her troubles, but her guess had been right. The energy shimmered, showing a series of symbols spinning around a hub before they disappeared in the flow of the water. They also warped her hook and dissolved it, making the water around it flash with heat.
So the spellcraft on the latch was what she had to “unbalance.” Returning to the lever under the container, she went at it. Pushing on it, again and again, pausing only as briefly as needed to surface, cough water out of her lungs, and go back down again.
Fuck, this would be so much easier with an angel incubus. But he had a more important task. This one was hers.
She refused to let herself think of giving up, and at last the container was sliding away from the shelf where it had been placed. It wasn’t much of a drop, the ocean contour behind it just a short hill. But she only needed it to tip. She heaved one more time, hard, shouting her frustration and demand for it to do her bidding. The gurgled sound of the yell hummed in her ears.
Triumph surged as the container started to topple over.
The energy stuttered at the latch site, like a lamp reacting to a cord coming halfway out of the socket. Hoping she wasn’t wrong, Ruth darted in, grabbed the latch and shoved against it as hard as she could.
The magical energy that somersaulted her backwards felt like a lighting strike. When she slammed into the coral reef crusting an older container, she received an up close and personal snapshot of the insides of her eyelids and her skull, plus annoyed commentary from all the nerve endings in her teeth.
When she could shake it off, she snarled as she saw the latch hadn’t completely given way. However, the energy also didn’t have the same cohesiveness. The blue rippled and sparked, as if an important component of the spell had been knocked out of place. Before she had time to figure out how to take advantage of it, she was forcibly reminded she wasn’t the only one working the problem.
The door exploded off its hinges, like a cannon had been fired at it from the inside.
It flipped away on the ocean current, bouncing off the shipwreck and getting caught against the stump of the mast.
The projectile that had broken the door loose wasn’t a cannonball. It was a bowling ball, which arced down once it felt the pull of gravity and disappeared into the ocean bottom.
Cautiously, she approached the opening of the container, feeling some residual electrical ripples, but nothing debilitating. The spell around the container had been dismantled.
A man was struggling through the debris of the container’s ruined contents. She assumed the bowling ball had come from one of the broken crates she saw.
Getting near an enraged male vampire was never a great idea, but he’d been underwater long enough to be disoriented, and she didn’t know how else they’d weakened him. However, when Lord Mason’s eyes found her, an amber color that reminded her of tiger eyes, she saw recognition. She stretched out her hand, and he caught it with a much larger one. His grip hurt, showing he was still less aware than normal, but she didn’t let him go.
She helped him get free of his prison and start toward the surface. By the time they reached the rock formation, he was able to drag himself onto it, where he coughed out an ocean’s worth of sea water.