the bathroom.
“Well, she's in a good mood this morning,” Isabella thought. She lay back down to snooze a few more minutes.
“Isabella, wake up,” Nora said as she got dressed.
“I'm up, I'm up,” she replied, and sat up again. “I don't know why I do that,” she thought. “I don't really go back to sleep.”
“Isabella, come on, wake up,” Nora said.
“I am up. Honestly.” Isabella reached underneath her pillow to find her glasses case but was unsuccessful. “Must have pushed the case off the bed again.” So she turned to look under the pillow and screamed.
“Isabella?” Nora asked.
Isabella's body was still lying in the bed, unconscious. “What the hell is going on? Am I astrally projecting?” She waved her ethereal hand through her body and nothing happened. “Nora, can you hear me?”
Nora didn't seem to respond to her words, although she was obviously concerned. She walked over to Isabella. “Hey! Come on, wake up already!”
“Try shaking me. Maybe that will work,” Isabella said. “Right, she can't hear me.”
Nora did try shaking Isabella, but she did not return to her body. Nora walked over to the adjoining door and knocked on it frantically.
“Well, it seems my astral form doesn’t suffer from myopia,” Isabella thought wryly.
“What?” Maryann asked, opening the door.
“Isabella won't wake up. I think we might have to take her to the hospital.”
“Oh, don't do that,” Isabella said. “We'll never get to the show.”
“I'll get the smelling salts,” Leah said. “Then we can try the hospital.”
“Maryann! Maryann! Come on, hear me,” Isabella said. She tried waving her hands through the redhead.
Maryann shuddered.
So Isabella did it again.
“Is it chilly in here to anyone else?” she asked.
“Oh, come on, Maryann, you're the only one who can figure out I'm under a spell!” Isabella took a moment to calm herself. “Now I know why a lot of ghosts communicate through moving objects and cold spots. I had no idea it was so hard to directly affect anything.”
Leah got the smelling salts out of the first aid kit and waved them under Isabella's nose.
Her astral form watched hopefully but this did not get her back into her body.
“Okay, so should we take her to the hospital? Should I call an ambulance instead?” Nora asked.
Isabella performed a kuji-in and focused her energy, then traced kanji in the air near Maryann. The kanji was for a wind spell that she had hardly ever needed to use, but it was the only thing she could think of that might have an effect on the real world.
Maryann, who was already on edge, did feel a burst of cold air and she shivered. “Wait, something is weird here. Let me check on something.”
“Okay, but I don't want to wait too long in case she's having some kind of seizure or something,” Nora answered.
Maryann went back to her room and pulled a clear quartz crystal on a thin string out of her suitcase and returned to Isabella and Nora's room. She recited a spell to use the crystal as a focus to detect magical oddities in the room. There was no immediate change in the crystal to Isabella's astral form or to the other women. Maryann first held the crystal up to herself. Nothing happened and that's what she expected. She held it up to Leah and Nora and nothing happened. When she leaned down and held the crystal over Isabella's body, the crystal turned dark, which only Maryann and Isabella could see. “That's-that's odd,” Maryann said as the other two stared at her skeptically.
“What's odd? And explain quick because I am two seconds away from calling an ambulance,” Nora said.
“I think Isabella's under a spell.”
“What?” they asked in unison.
Maryann pulled the crystal away from Isabella's body and held it up to herself again, just to make sure the spell was working. “I'm detecting some kind of dark magic on Isabella's body, but I don't know exactly what this means.”
“Damn it, I need a better way to communicate,” Isabella said, and looked around the room. Like all hotel rooms, there was a pen and a pad of paper with the hotel stationary on the desk. She walked over to the desk and performed a longer kuji-in.
“Are you sure Isabella's under a spell?” Leah asked Maryann.
“Yes, I'm absolutely sure of it, and something else is going on here. I keep feeling these cold breezes.”
“That's just the air conditioner,” Nora replied impatiently. “How can Isabella be under a spell? There aren't a lot of people who can do that.”
“The Red Queen!” Leah exclaimed. “She said she didn't like competition, and she said the best way to keep us from coming back next year was if we never played at all. Well, now we're down one of our band members. We can't play without her.”
“What makes you think she can do magic like this?”
Isabella focused her energy and tried to grasp the pen. Her hand went through it. She calmed herself and ran through a few more iterations of the mantra.
“She's Maryann's doppelganger. If Isabella's doppelganger was a medium, then it means Maryann's doppelganger can do serious magic.”
“You're being ridiculous!” Nora snapped. “Yeah, so that Rowan girl was a lot like Isabella, but it doesn't mean this Red Queen can do any magic. Sure, she threatened us, and sure, this is really going to make it hard to play tonight, but it doesn't mean she's responsible.”
“Wait, I can try to find out,” Maryann said. “I can do a quick divination.”
“I still think we should take her to the hospital,” Nora said.
Isabella tried to grasp the pen again and this time it worked, but it was very difficult, as though she was solid and trying to hold to something made of smoke.
“Going to the hospital won't help her if she's under a spell,” Maryann countered.
“Just because something weird is going on doesn't mean it's a spell,” Nora retorted. “And maybe even if it is that doesn't mean we shouldn't take her to the hospital!”
Isabella wrote just one word, dropped the pen, and pulled the paper off the pad. That effort left her exhausted and she couldn't move the paper any further, so she used her wind spell again to try to move it in the direction her friends. It settled near Leah but she wasn't paying attention as Maryann and Nora were squabbling. So Isabella walked over and stuck her hand in Maryann again.
This was enough to cause Maryann to lose her train of thought and twitch. “What is that?” she snapped.
Isabella used her spell to rattle the paper again.
Leah noticed the moving paper and picked it up. She frowned. “Hey, Nora, I think Maryann's right.”
“What?”
“See for yourself,” she said, and passed the paper to Nora.
There was one word written in shaky but unmistakably Isabella's handwriting - 'help.'
Nora sighed. “Okay, fine. Maryann, do your thing. We need to figure out what's going on here.”
Maryann took the paper. “This will help my divination. I wonder how she wrote this.” She walked back to her room with Leah and Nora following.
“Hey, I'm going to grab us some breakfast,” Leah said.
Nora, Maryann, and even Isabella just stared at her.
“What? I can't help with this, and I'm getting hungry. I'll just grab some stuff from the continental breakfast if there's anything left or go pick up something for us. And really, I need some coffee.”
Maryann shrugged. “I suppose it's not a bad idea.”
“Nora, come with me. You can't help Maryann either. We don't want to be in the way.”
“It's not a problem,” Maryann said.
“I'll go with Leah. If I don't, she'll grab nothing but doughnuts.”
“You say that like it's a bad thing.”
“It is, for our health. We'll be back in a few.” They got their purses and headed out
.
Maryann pulled out her tarot deck and cleared off a space on the floor. Isabella sat down facing Maryann. The redhead shuffled her deck and performed a very short but direct divination. She pulled out a notebook and wrote some notes while talking out loud. “Okay, first card, who is this about?” she said, and tossed out the Queen of Swords. “Well, that's good. I know this is about Isabella. Okay, next card, what has happened to Isabella?” She tossed out the Eight of Swords. “She's trapped.”
Isabella performed her wind spell again.
Maryann felt the cold blast. “Oh, I think I get it! Isabella, are you astrally projecting?”
“Yes! I mean, damn it.” She used her wind spell to shake the Queen of Swords.
“So you are astrally projecting! And you can't get back or you would have already, which means you're trapped outside your body.” She jotted down some notes. “This is powerful magic. We need to get you back in your body or there could be long-term damage. Third card, who put the spell on Isabella?” The next card turned up was the Queen of Wands in the reversed position.
They both stared at the card.
“So, Leah was right,” Maryann said. “You know, I never really know what to think when her crazy comic book theories turn out to be right.”
“I hear that,” Isabella replied.
“I wish I could talk with you,” she said. “I don't know that much about this spirit magic stuff.” She brightened up. “But maybe I can make it easier for you to talk with me.” She pulled another small pad of paper out of her suitcase and a pen. She consulted her Book of Shadows and finally performed a spell on the pen. “Okay, I tried to infuse magical energy into the pen to make it easier for you to