Aaron followed instructions, but he looked around himself while doing so almost as if to make sure no one was watching, the extra agenda being to try and catch that scent he had almost caught, but the fucking dampness was making it difficult.
There was something conspiratorial about the way both men were crouched around the candle. From above it probably looked like they were a couple of overgrown kids getting ready to light a fire-cracker or a bottle-rocket without permission. One they had stolen from their father’s garage and brought out into the woods so that they could watch it go up privately, and then scatter before anyone could reach them.
“What are you going to do?” Aaron asked.
“A trick Amber taught me a while back,” Damien said, and he started to close the gap between the candle and his mouth like it was a birthday candle and he was about to blow it out. And he was about to blow on it, but what he wanted was the opposite effect.
Aaron felt a tickle at the base of his neck that travelled down the length of his spine and made him shudder and shake in an instant. Then Damien blew on the wick, and the candle lit up as if by magic. Only it wasn’t as if by magic. It was magic. And no matter how small the effect may have been, Aaron was left with a feeling of wonderment in his chest.
His younger self called to him from across the gulf of time and memory, waving and smiling, excited. He had always enjoyed watching Marvin the Magnificent’ s Magical Hour on the TV when he was a kid. The way he would carve his assistant in two, open his jacket and set a whole flock of doves loose, or make fire shoot out of the palm of his hand would light up Aaron’s chubby little cheeks.
He remembered the show now and smiled.
Then he realized; they’ve all got family problems too. And that was comforting.
“Well look at that,” Frank said, “If you ever get tired of graphic design you can always book gigs at children’s parties.”
“I’d rather appear at a children’s party than a circus,” Damien said, grinning.
“Can we get back to it?” Aaron asked. He could feel the nerve at the curve of his skull, just above his right eye, starting to twitch.
“Yeah, sorry,” Damien said, “I’ll light the other ones. Let me know if this one goes out. This is the important one.”
Frank helped Damien with another candle, and then Damien managed the remaining three all on his own. The wind had died down now and the flames were holding, although Aaron didn’t know how long that would be for. He could sense the change in the air pressure—a sure sign of a coming storm—and… God-dammit, now where the fuck is that smell?
“We’re ready,” Damien said.
Aaron turned, walked around the circle—which had been cast wide, he saw—, and said “Should I stand here?”
“Anywhere you want, baby,” Frank said, taking up position opposite from him.
Damien stood at the head of the circle; close to the candle he had told Aaron was important. It was a dull white candle, just like all the others, although maybe it wasn’t as worn out. Could have been that’s what he meant. Damien had placed the bowl in the center of the circle of candles, but it was empty.
“What I’m going to do,” Damien started to say, “Is try to summon the Whispers.”
“Alright,” Aaron said, “I’ve gotta ask, because I know you didn’t just mean what I think you meant.”
“Frank?”
Frank sighed. “I don’t know why I have to explain it. Whispers and I don’t exactly get along and you’re the one doing the summoning.”
“Just tell him while I get ready.”
“A Whisper,” Frank said, in his Professor voice, “Is a dead witch; or, rather, the soul of a dead witch. A Whisper is what a really awesome witch will become when he or she dies; a witch that has done great things in life or has died selflessly. It’s said that they live with the spirit of the Goddess, and that they carry a part of her Holy light with them wherever they go.”
“Holy… that’s why Damien thinks they’ll help? Because holy trumps unholy?”
“I don’t know if they will,” Frank said, “I’ve seen him call them before and watched them do diddly against the hooded men out in the woods last time, but maybe that was a fluke.”
“So you’re saying this might not work?”
“I’m saying that I wouldn’t try it because I wouldn’t be able to make it work at all. Hell, I may just burst into flames. But Damien could pull it off.”
Aaron nodded. “Alright, let’s try and make contact with Amber.”
All eyes fell to Damien, now. His concentration was total; his eyes were closed, his breathing was soft, and his hands fell limply at his side. For a second Aaron thought Damien’s head was going to flop forward like those people Marvin the Magnificent would put into a trance—or flop backward like a person possessed by a demon. But he did neither. Instead, he started to speak.
“To bind the spell well every time, let the spell be said in rhyme. Moon Goddess from on high, I send my plea into your sky; I ask you guide me to my goal, and pour your light into this bowl. For a demon stalks tonight, spreading foul and awful blight; oh gracious Goddess, we ask of you, listen to our desperate plight.”
Damien paused, repeated the incantation once more, and then again. Aaron kept his eyes shut and waited, but when the hairs on the back of his neck and forearms begun to rise, he couldn’t keep his curiosity contained. He opened his eyes expecting to see the same dim clearing they had been standing in, and it was the same forest, but there was nothing dim about it.
Shimmering, silver light was licking the leaves, trees, and branches. Damien and Frank were casting long, unquiet shadows that seemed to stretch way into the tree-line around them. And in the center of the circle, in the bowl Damien had placed on the floor, something was happening. Little motes of light were falling into it from above like tiny, brilliant snowflakes all following the same flight-plan.
Aaron watched, his Adam’s apple working hard to swallow, as the balls of light touched the bowl and then came back up again like bouncing balls being dropped on the surface of the moon. Aaron’s breathing became lighter, and the pressure he had been feeling on his chest all day—feeling it more intensely in the woods—began to disappear.
Even Frank seemed awestruck, his eyes wide, his naturally pale face looking ghost-white against the glow from the hundreds and hundreds of little bouncing balls of light.
They seemed to gravitate towards Damien, Aaron saw, some of them—or maybe all of them—able to take flight, hover, levitate, and generally move like hummingbirds. A small cluster of them floated over to Aaron, some landing on his shoulder, others on the top of his head. Their light was cold, and even though he was wearing a shirt and a jacket, the cold seemed to pierce whatever fabric they touched and search for a spot of skin to cool even further.
“Amber,” Damien said, in a low voice that was barely a whisper. He was talking to a group of orbs hovering just in front of his face. “We want to talk to Amber, but something is blocking us.”
The orbs pulsed with silver light, rearranged themselves, and then pulsed again. Damien nodded. If these were the spirits of dead witches… then how was he able to talk to them? Wasn’t Collette the weird one who could see ghosts? But maybe they weren’t really ghosts. Thinking about it hurt Aaron’s head, so he decided to bench the thoughts and the questions for later.
“Can you break through?” Damien asked. The cluster of orbs throbbed again, the light growing in intensity and then shrinking, and Damien nodded in response. “Please try.”
Aaron glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, his shadow fell away into the darkness made almost more total by the brilliant light emanating from the center of the circle. In it, he thought he saw… something—someone?—but then the flecks of light on his shoulder took off, took flight, and began to circle around the ring, each sliver pulsating with its own brightness to create a kind of strobing effect that made Aaron shield his eyes.
The silver fireflies picked up th
eir speed, rushing now around the circle at breakneck speed. Aaron felt a kind of lightness come down on him, as if he had just let go of a backpack full of bricks. Then Frank’s voice, high and shrill, cut through the feeling and snapped it in two.
“There!” he said, “In the woods!”
Damien turned his neck and saw it. Aaron saw it too. There was someone else in the woods alright, a dark figure skulking between the trees. Some of the lights had broken off from the main body still spinning around the circle and gone for the dark shape in the woods. It tried to bat them away, making a hiss like a droplet of water on the hood of a car that had been left in the sun. But while its shape may have been human, its movements weren’t.
Aaron turned around, his body taut as a guitar string, and watched as the dark figure’s arms jerked inhumanly—turning at impossible angles, moving like a blur—to bat the balls of light away as if they were mosquitoes. It let out a shriek but it wasn’t a sound Aaron could hear with his ears, it was one that clawed at the back of his mind like the sound of Freddy Krueger’s nails dragging along a metal pipe. The assaulting sensation made him grimace and wrap his hands around his temples but the screech died away in an instant, and when Aaron looked up again the figure was gone too.
Only the lights remained now, hovering slowly back into formation, past him, over his shoulders, drifting in the space between his arms and legs, and through his hair like water. He even heard one of them as it went past his ear. It made a soothing humming sound, not at all like the buzzing of an insect, but more like a high, held piano note trailing off as the tiny thing went out of earshot.
He spun around again to follow this orb and watched it congregate with the others which were floating toward the center of the circle. They were combining, locking together to form a shape of shimmering silver light. And as they worked, Aaron could see exactly what shape they were taking. Somehow, as ridiculous as the idea of it was, the lights were combining to create Amber’s likeness.
Her already pale skin shimmered with the light of a hundred thousand silver motes. The slivers of light closing on her head turned a pale orange, making her hair seem to lick at the air around it like fire. Amber looked like a ghost, like a mirage, but it was her. She was even wearing clothes! Only… something was wrong. She was lying down with her head tilted back and Aaron knew this wasn’t a sleeping pose, either. She was unconscious. And some of the orbs around her leg were starting to turn red.
“Amber!” he said. His heart jumped into his throat and he rushed to the center of the circle, threw himself to his knees, and went to pick her up but his hands went through her as if she were smoke, breaking her image in two places. The orbs reformed into her likeness, but Aaron chastised himself and raised his hands so as not to touch her again.
“She’s hurt,” Aaron said, “Fuck! We were too late to warn her!”
But then she opened her eyes, blinked, and looked up at Aaron. A brief sigh escaped her lips followed by a smile. “Hey handsome,” she said.
Aaron’s eyes were starting to sting. Seeing her again like this, hurt and unconscious, and being unable to help her… it was twisting him up on the inside like a wet rag over a sink. He wanted to beat the ground, throw his wolf skin on, run into the woods and howl so loudly that whatever bastard did this to her would hear him and know his death was coming.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
Amber nodded, still smiling. “I burnt the lasagna again,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“What? No you didn’t, you didn’t burn anything. What happened to you?”
“It’s okay, pizza is on me again.”
Aaron’s head swung around to find Frank. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, “She isn’t making sense.”
He approached, knelt down beside the shimmering, ethereal image of Amber, and narrowed his eyes. “Her mind is all jumbled up,” he said, “She’s definitely been knocked out cold.”
“Can you do anything?”
“I’ll try.”
Frank concentrated for a moment, and then Amber blinked. Blinked again. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie where the robot starts to come back to some kind of sentience as the engineer works, crisscrossing wires and soldering things back into place. Only Frank wasn’t moving. He was reaching with his mind, across space, to find Amber. And it looked, at least to Aaron, like he had found her.
“Aaron?” she asked.
The smile that had been waiting to come spilling out of Aaron, like a ray of light holding behind a mantle of thick clouds, finally came. “Amber,” he said, “Thank God you’re alright.”
“I… am I dreaming?”
“No, witch, you’re not,” Frank said, “But when you wake up you’re probably gonna think you were dreaming. How’s your head?”
“I haven’t had any complaints.”
“That’s a good girl. She’s here. We can talk to her.”
Aaron shuffled on his knees until he was a little closer to her. “What happened to you?” he asked, “Your leg, it looks like its bleeding.”
“It was her,” she said, “I fought her. Linezka. She was here.”
He felt his skin stretch tightly against his muscles. “We were too late. I’m sorry. We figured out that there was a demon around, blocking us from getting in contact with you. Then Frank had a vision and… fuck, these guys can tell the story better. But you’re alive, and that’s all that matters.”
“I knew about the demon,” Amber said, “I saw it in the pictures.”
“Pictures? What pictures?”
“I can’t explain it right now. But you have to listen to me. I went to her, to Linezka, using a portal. And when I got to her… I found myself in an apartment in Seattle.”
“Seattle?” Frank said, “Sure, I can see it. Seattle makes for grungy, angst-filled witches. I blame Nirvana.”
Aaron could smell Damien’s fear escape his skin through his pores at the mention of Seattle. He looked up, found Damien’s face, held his gaze to try and get him to speak when that strange smell he had caught earlier came back. What the fuck is it? He started to sniff the air.
“No,” Amber said, “Just shut up and listen to me for a second. I think you’ve got it wrong. About the demon, I mean. I don’t think it was trying to isolate me. I think it was trying to isolate you.”
“Us?” Frank asked. “Why the hell would it want to isolate us?”
“I don’t know, but I think you’re in danger; and I know Aaron’s felt it for some time.”
Aaron’s attention went to her at the sound of his name.
“I have,” he said, “I haven’t been able to sit still for a long time.” He came to her and arched over her. He so badly wanted to kiss her, to press his lips against hers—even if she was only a ghostly mirage of the girl he loved. But he didn’t want to distort the image of her beautiful, radiant face. Not for a second. He realized, then, that he was trembling.
“It’s weird,” she said, “Lying here, speaking to you… everything’s so clear right now. Everything makes sense.”
Aaron nodded.
“I just wanted to tell you… to answer your question… from before.”
“Schhh,” Aaron said, “You don’t have to do that right now, okay? Do it in person when you get back. Right now just… just wake up and come home to me. To us.” He looked up. “Damien, is there anything you can do for her leg?”
“I think so,” he said, approaching. “I’ve never done this long-distance, though.”
“Try.”
Aaron stood up. Sniffed at the air again. The scent was still there, and stronger now. Floating on the back of the breeze coming… coming… from the direction of our house.
“What is it, Scooby?” Frank asked. “Got a scent?”
Aaron sucked in air. His brow furrowed, alarm clearly visible on his face, and said “Fire.”
“What?” Frank asked.
“Fire! You two wait here!”
Aaron made a mad dash in
to the tree line, running headlong into the dark until he was only a blur, a spot, and then nothing. His speed was immense, like a bullet—no, a bullet train—shoulders bashing into and smashing wayward branches, leaping over fallen logs and shallow dips with the ease of a dancer—or a wolf. He caught the scent more fully, now and it had the heady, heavy, suffocating taste of fire; but also something else. It had sickly, foul taste like rotten eggs; and when he saw the plume of smoke rising from between the trees and glimpsed the glow of the fire at its source, the glow was green.
Not red or orange.
But green.
CHAPTER 26
Being unconscious isn’t like being asleep. When you’re out cold, you don’t dream. You don’t rest—not really. Your chest doesn’t heave lightly, your eyes don’t twitch with the entering of REM sleep, and you don’t smile and laugh like when you’re wrapped up in a good dream. In fact, unconscious people don’t dream at all—it just chemically doesn’t happen. Dreams happen when you sleep… so why, then, did I have Aaron, Frank and Damien on the mind when I came to? And why could I hear their voices at the back of my mind even as I blinked my eyes into focus?
The same edge of darkness that had dragged me into unconsciousness persisted, but the scenery was different. A soft, cool breeze was soothed my face, whipping thin strands of my lazy hair with it. Running water. The ground, hard and wet beneath my back. Stone? And in my hand, a clump of black hair held so tightly my knuckles were turning white.
Across from us, firefighters were working hard to smother the blaze that had broken out in the Berlin Cathedral. I struggled to rise, but my body gave out beneath me.
A hand pressed against my chest, gentle, tender. “Schhh, cherie,” Collette’s voice, sweet as an angel’s.
“Wh-what?”
“You must rest a moment.”
The blackness at the edges of my vision receded, but my headache persisted and I realized that I was shivering—a fever? Ahead of me was the river Spree, chuckling along slowly and hissing with the fall of rain. I was sitting on the ground with my back up against a stone wall in a nook, away from passersby. Across from where I was sitting, on the other side of the river, the Cathedral basilica rose up from the ground like an impossibly huge monolith, green and wet. We had escaped the church and gone across the river somehow.