“You made it,” he said to his sister.
“It was easy thanks to you,” she said. Her voice seemed to echo somehow, as if there were two of her speaking. “But the rest won’t be.”
“What do you mean?”
“We aren’t alone in here, Damien. I can feel it.”
Damien swallowed. “We have to find Natalie and wake her up.”
Lily nodded.
He strode to the other side of the tiny cabin, past his sister, and put his hand on the door knob leading to the outside. The sun was in his eyes here. He could see it high in the sky, rising from the East and throwing shadows all over the land, reigning supreme over all. The Horned God; that was the name the ancient Pagans gave it. It was the light-bringer, the champion that fought away the darkness, the protector of all. In that moment Damien felt oddly small, and while the sensation was off-putting he couldn’t help but feel like he had tapped into some kind of ancient truth and become a part of it.
Even if it was only for a moment.
When he pushed the door open and stepped outside Damien found himself not on the sun-touched deck of a ship, but in the belly of a tall building he immediately recognized as his sister’s. He looked around and saw the mailboxes, the elevator, and even the bulletin board with the month’s announcements; only he couldn’t make sense of any of the letters or numbers he was seeing.
Lily, he thought, when he didn’t hear her enter after him.
“I’m here,” she said from behind. Her voice echoed even louder in the enclosed space and it startled him. Now it sounded like there was three of her, each speaking a second or so after the one that had come before to create a crazy cacophony of chattering voices.
“Why are we here?” he asked when the clamor stopped.
“I don’t know, but we should probably go to my place don’t you think? Everything is symbols and metaphors in here, Damien. The Astral moves like the ocean; you have to go with the current and it will take you where you need to be.”
Damien nodded and gestured for Lily to lead the way, which she did. He wasn’t sure what they were going to find at her apartment, but during the ascent up the stairwell he caught the faintest hint of cinnamon in the air and it gave him pause. Maybe it was only one of those things that happens in dreams; an almost random piece of sensory input that comes at you from someplace deep in your subconscious. But he knew better than that now.
“She’s here,” he said.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lily picked up the pace and bounded the steps two at a time. Damien followed hot on her heels, blood pumping hard throughout his body; so hard in fact that the sound of his heart seemed to be coming from outside of his body somewhere, as if the walls and floors themselves were pulsing with the rhythm of the muscle in his chest. Within moments the sound grew so loud and strong Damien thought he was going to collapse, but he didn’t care—he pushed on and ran after his sister, making sure to stay as close to her as possible.
When they got to the door, the source of the cinnamon aroma, he opened it and swept inside.
Chapter Five
“Holy shit.”
Damien wasn’t sure if he had just said those words or if he had projected his thought out into the world and heard it echoed back to him. He cocked an eyebrow and scanned the room, wondering how much of what was in front of him was real and how much of it was just something that happened in dreams.
He clenched his fist around the stone in his hand.
“Be careful,” Lily said, “And be alert.”
It was Natalie, only it wasn’t just Natalie; the room was full of Natalie. Natalie was standing by the kitchen, making a garden salad in a big white bowl. She was also by the window with a cigarette between her lips. Another Natalie was sitting on the sofa watching TV; when Damien took a glance, he saw another Natalie on the screen acting out a scene from a movie he was sure looked familiar.
Each version of Natalie was wearing the same clothes she had been wearing earlier down to the purple scarf around her neck, and all looked like they hadn’t slept in weeks.
Damien stepped lightly into the room, wondering whether he should say hi, remain silent, or turn around and walk away. Lily also didn’t seem to know what to do. She stalked around the kitchen counter and scanned Natalie’s face for any hint of conscious thought, but found none.
“Nat?” she asked the girl, but there was no response.
“I don’t think they’ll hear us,” Damien said as he approached the girl by the window. “I think they’re… stuck. This is trippy.”
“We’re in her dreamspace,” Lily said, “This is her subconscious; a place of symbols and metaphors. Nothing will be what it seems, nothing will make sense, but we have to try—for Natalie.”
The amber in Damien’s hand felt warmer now, somehow. He rubbed it with his thumb and the Natalie by the window turned to look at him, let a lazy cloud of smoke leave her lips, and then turned back toward the window. Did she… see him? Was that some kind of acknowledgement?
From the TV, an audience broke out into laughter.
When Damien looked the heroine was running through a creepy, dense forest being chased by a dark silhouette, only the tune that accompanied the scene was happy and quick, and whatever spectators were watching thought it was hilarious. He realized now that he recognized the movie—the scene anyway. This had been the movie Damien watched with Natalie those few weeks ago, only it wasn’t really the same movie; he just thought he recognized it.
He remembered, now, that Natalie had been sitting on the sofa with Damien and Lily had been in the kitchen making dinner, but he couldn’t recall who had been smoking at the window. Taking his cue from the stone steadily warming in the palm of his hand, the only thing that felt real to him, he went to the sofa and sat down next to the Natalie watching TV.
“Hey,” he said, but she didn’t answer.
Her face was cold and aloof, half-wrinkled in thought and half asleep. Like she was trying to make sense of the movie playing out on the TV but, at the same time, was too tired to give it too much thought.
Damien rubbed the stone between his thumb and forefinger and tried again. This time, she turned to look at him and smiled.
“Damien,” she said with a smile that lit up the room, “You made it!”
“Of course I did,” he said.
“You missed half the movie, though.”
“It’s okay; I think I’ve seen this one.”
“Don’t’ worry; we can watch it again if you want. I’m not in any rush.”
Her eyes beamed with intelligence and alertness, but Damien sensed something in them, something that caused him to hesitate for a moment, something sinister. Were they a little too wide, maybe? A little too intense? She had gone from lethargic to alert in a split second and all because Damien had rubbed the stone between his fingers.
Unless the stone had nothing to do with any of this.
Damien didn’t understand enough about what was going on to make a calculated decision on how to act. It was all instinct. Lily, likewise, was watching on with a puzzled expression planted on her face. She looked like a kid who had just been asked a tough math question.
“So,” Damien said, “H-how are you?”
Natalie sighed. “A little tired, I guess,” she said, “But otherwise okay. I was waiting for you to get here, actually.”
“Me?”
She nodded and made an uh-huh sound. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Why don’t you like me?”
The question sent Damien reeling. Out of his periphery he glimpsed Lily moving around the kitchen, around the sofa, and standing close to the Natalie he was talking to. He sensed Lily wouldn’t be able to help him with this. After all, he was the only one who had gotten any attention from the Natalie clones in the room.
“I… of course I like you,” he said.
“But not in the way I want you to,” she said.
“It?
??s not like that.”
“Oh? So how is it then?”
“I—”
“I’m funny,” she said, interrupting, “I have a 4.0 GPA, I’m pretty, I’m a Witch, and I’m in to you. What is it about me that you don’t like?”
“It’s not that I don’t like you.”
Natalie cocked an eyebrow. In that gesture, she and Damien were very similar. “Then please tell me what it is, Damien, because I’m tired of trying with you.”
Damien paused, licked his lips, and tried to formulate a sentence in his mind, but the words weren’t coming to him. He searched for Lily’s eyes and held them. All she could do was nod. He didn’t think she knew something he didn’t, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if she did. She was, after all, the telepath here. For all he knew the very walls themselves were speaking into her mind, but he could only hear and react using the senses he owned.
“Look,” he started, “I like you. I do. You are pretty and smart and funny. I just thought, since we were in the same Coven—”
“That’s not fair,” she said, “It just isn’t.”
It wasn’t. Damien knew that much. Natalie had been sweet to him, and she was pretty, intelligent, a Witch. She had said all those things herself just now, only he didn’t need to hear them to know they were true. Natalie was the perfect girl for him, and she had tried hard in the last few weeks. He couldn’t deny that.
But Damien didn’t want to tell her the real reason why he couldn’t give himself in the way she wanted.
The truth was a thing only he and Lily knew. A secret they shared and swore they would take to their graves, for their own protection and for the protection of everyone around them. But all secrets begged to be known. Otherwise how would Damien and Lily have discovered the knowledge that made them want to escape everything they had ever known?
It wasn’t just that, either. There was something else; another truth he didn’t want to part with. The more immediate fear of getting too close to Natalie came from a simple, physical secret; one being kept hostage by his own insecurity and a fear of inadequacy programmed into him by his upbringing.
He was a virgin.
Finally, Damien took Natalie’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t,” she said. “Just tell me the truth, Damien. Tell me the truth and everything will be okay.”
But he wasn’t sure that it would be. How would Natalie be able to accept the truth of what Damien and Lily had done in another life? Telling her could change everything, could tear their Coven apart. And yet, he really was talking to a part of Natalie’s subconscious, making an excuse to not accept her feelings and reciprocate them could have the same effect anyway.
“Natalie,” Lily said, but Natalie didn’t look at her.
Damien looked up. Lily closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and seemed to be reaching out with her mind. He had seen her do Magick often enough that he knew when it was coming. The ripples her Power made in the Currents were always strong; so strong he could almost feel them against his skin.
But here? The Power wasn’t welcome here.
The ceiling split apart with a loud crack. Damien shot up from the sofa and found his sister’s wide eyes full of fear. The Natalie by the window turned, now, scowling, and the Natalie in the kitchen hurled the salad bowl across the room, exploding it into a hundred tiny pieces against a wall.
“That’s not in the rules,” the Natalie on the sofa said, standing. Her voice was coarse now, harsh and raspy. “This is my playground now, and that is not. In. The. Rules.”
Rules? Whose rules?
The entire room started to rumble. Pots and pans fell out of cupboards, a ceramic vase that had been sitting near the front door tumbled to the ground and smashed, and an ill smelling wind came crashing through the window and begun tugging at Natalie’s hair. Everyone’s hair. For an instant, only the barest of instants, Damien felt a trickle of fear worm its way into his heart and his hands started to shake.
“Who are you?” Damien said over the howling of the wind.
“Don’t you remember me?” Natalie said, only it wasn’t her voice, now. The dryness had completely transformed it into something… else. Not quite male, not quite female, and not quite human. But there was something familiar to the voice; it was like an old song he was hearing again for the first time in years.
“Damien!” Lily said.
Natalie whipped around. “Lilith,” she said, “It’s so nice to see you again after all this time.”
“Lily, we have to go,” Damien said, “We have to get out now.”
“Go?” Natalie asked, “But you just got here, and you were about to get to the good part of the story.”
“You need to leave,” Lily said to the thing that wasn’t Natalie, “You didn’t want her.”
“That’s right. I wanted him. But beggars can’t be choosers, right?” Natalie laughed a raspy laugh.
Another crack accompanied Natalie’s laughs, only this time the crack seemed to stretch on and on, and when Damien looked up he saw fingers of black lines appearing on the ceiling and walls, stretching and reaching for each other. Bits of wood and masonry began to fall as the cracks spread across the ceiling, and Damien knew it was time to get out.
He yelled for his sister to follow and made for the door. The Natalie in the kitchen made a swipe for him with a kitchen knife but he ducked under it and pushed her aside. Lily broke around the sofa but the Natalie at the window grabbed her arm and yanked her hard. With a hard tug she managed to wrench herself free, but sofa Natalie was in her path, and she had no way to reach Damien.
“Go!” she said, “I’ll find you!”
Damien didn’t have a choice. The next thing he knew, he was running. Only he wasn’t dashing down the hall of a building as he would have expected. He was on a wide, empty street; Market Street, he figured. The mist was everywhere, choking everything, but he could still see where he was going.
Down Market Street he went. Then, somehow, he was flying along Lombard Street, and then he was sprinting by the bay, past the piers, up a hill then down another. He was anywhere and everywhere and nowhere. Chased. Hunted. Terrified. And when he finally found a place to rest and catch his breath, along a rocky shore just west of the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew.
He was alone too.
Chapter Six
That wasn’t Natalie.
She may have looked, talked, and moved like Natalie, but it wasn’t her. It was that thing, whatever entity had been meant for Damien, that he had spoken to and interacted with. And it knew who he was. It knew who Lily was.
Shit. Lily.
His hands were trembling. The one clamped around the Amber gemstone was starting to hurt from how tightly he was holding onto it. As Damien cast his gaze over the San Francisco bay, looking up from below at a bruised sky zooming by like a time-lapse shot, all he could think about was how he had run out and left Lily there.
Some of the clouds even started to look like her after a time.
Was she okay? Had she managed to get away from… whatever that thing was? Was she looking for him? Damien wasn’t a clairvoyant or a diviner; he couldn’t see into the past, the present, or the future, and wasn’t very good at throwing his senses into the Nether to glimpse the invisible world for clues that might help him solve a problem. Not that he thought he could even reach the Nether from inside Natalie’s mind.
He allowed himself a moment to breathe and relax, because what else could he do? When he found a rock he liked—a task that seemed to take three hours—he sat down, crossed his legs, and placed the Amber carefully on his knee. Here, whatever here was, the stone really did look like a flame trapped in a stone.
The golden, orange light flickered and danced within the confines of the soft, smooth gem. Lazy fingers of fire stroked the edges of the cage that contained them, enticing, requesting, searching for a way out. But he couldn’t release them. This was Lily’s beacon
. She would need it if she was going to find him, and he needed finding now more than ever. Without her he had no idea how he was going to find Natalie; never mind wake up.
If he even could.
“Ahoy!” called a voice from out at sea.
Damien looked up and saw a small fishing ship, drifting lazily a few hundred feet from where he was sitting. There was a man in the cabin of the small fishing ship; he was wearing a yellow overcoat, a hat, had a long white beard, and he was waving at the shore. After looking around and finding no one, Damien decided that the man was talking to him.
“Ahoy,” Damien said, loud enough for the man on the ship to hear.
“Where are you headed, boy?”
“I’m… not heading anywhere. Just sitting on this rock.”
“Well, if you need to be getting somewhere, I’m pulling up to port just down there.”
Was this another trick? “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The man went back to controlling his boat and, as he had said a moment ago, pulled it in to a wooden dock not far from where Damien was sitting. He remembered these rocks as the ones where he had met Natalie earlier on, but where he was looking now there was an old fishing village in place of a modern car-park and the Beach Bistro Café.
Gulls encircled it, searching for any morsel they could find, while big burly men hauled boxes full of fish and supplies from one side of the dock to the other. The cars parked nearby were still modern, but everything else—the small warehouses, the ditty the workmen were singing, and the clamor of bells and gulls—had a kind of ancient feel to it. Not just old, but ancient. As if these men had been fishing here and hauling boxes since the beginning of time.
In what seemed like half a heartbeat, Damien was walking toward the fishing village. He couldn’t remember having gotten off the rock he had been sitting on, but he guessed he must have. The dizzying effects of this dreamlike world were starting to take their toll in the form of a pinching headache dully stabbing at his left temple, but it wasn’t enough to bother him much.
Careful not to touch anything or disturb anyone, he navigated his way through the tangle of boxes, tackle, and live flopping fish until he reached a ticket booth. There was a sign posted on top of the little wooden box, but he couldn’t read it. In fact, he barely even registered it. He just assumed one was there and somehow knew what the box was. Inside the booth there was a woman, aging and haggard, but still youthful in her own right.