“Hold hands,” Helena said.
I took Collette’s hand and squeezed it, but we were separated from the other witches whose clasped hands now formed a full circle around us. Collette nodded at me and I nodded back, and in my heart I felt… something; a kind of buzzing, like static. It wasn’t Magick, though. It was something else. I remembered looking out of my kitchen window a few weeks ago, watching the rolling grey sky as a storm front approached Raven’s Glen, and feeling the sudden change in pressure. My ears popped as I watched and I knew something was about to happen, but not what.
“Dark Mother,” Helena started to say, “Hear us.”
The witches around us said “Hear us.”
“We call on you tonight as humble servants, as instruments of your divine will. Bless us with your light, oh Dark Mother, that we may use it to guide our path through the darkness. Hear us.”
Again the witches around the pentacle repeated the words “Hear us,” and their voices, combined with Helena’s, created a cacophony of sound that came back to us threefold, bouncing off the high church walls and off its domed ceiling in a headlong plunge before bouncing back up again upon touching the marble floor, a process which repeated until the sound died off in a distant echo.
When all was quiet again, Helena said “Luther, unlock your aura to us. It is the only link we have to her, and the only way we will be able to bridge the gap between us.”
Luther nodded, closed his eyes, and concentrated. I couldn’t see his aura like Helena could but I could taste it; bitter and dry, like licking a thick, old page in a dusty book. Not that I had ever done that, but I trusted in my mind’s interpretation of things most of the time and I wasn’t about to stop now.
That’s when things started to happen.
First was the hum. It was like the soft, dull sound that comes out of a power transformer. I had walked by the one on the street, just outside of my house, enough times to know what it sounded like. On those truly quiet Saturday mornings, when the whole town was asleep, you could sometimes hear it from my bedroom window, humming silently away, its internal mechanisms working hard to ensure every waking resident of my neighborhood had electricity to drink their morning coffee with.
Then there came the steadily growing vibration. This started shortly after Helena and her witches began to pray to the Dark Mother in their own languages and under their own breaths. I had never seen a ritual done like that before. Typically everyone spoke in the same language, most times in unison, other times in a row-your-boat style. But the energy they were generating was immense, and I was starting to feel the buzz in my toes first, and then in my shins and calves. Moments later and the vibrations were tickling my more sensitive areas; like a current rising along the inside of my thighs, climbing up between my legs, into my belly, my chest, my breasts, and my nipples.
A soft sigh escaped my mouth, and I had to bite down on my lip to stifle anymore rogue moans which may have wanted to make an egress. The feeling made me think of Aaron in that last moment before reality met fantasy, and I realized that I missed him very much, and that I would have liked to see him again before… before doing this. To answer his question, one way or the other.
But I didn’t get my wish.
Right before my eyes reality cracked open with a mighty rip. The fissure was only an arm’s length, but it was silver and bright and I raised my free hand up to protect my eyes from the light, but I didn’t have to. The brightness didn’t burn my eyes, just like the flickering flames licking outward from the crack didn’t sear my skin. And then I recognized the flames for what they were.
Moon Fire.
I turned my eyes up to Collette, whose face was now awash with the light of the Goddess, and nodded at her. Then I reached for the crack with my hand, let the soft, cold fire kiss my skin, and bid the fissure to stretch with the power of my mind. And it did. The seam stretched and ripped further, silver fire spilling out from within, until the tear was about half as long as my whole body.
Without hesitation, I tucked my knee into my chest and pushed my foot into the crack of light. My body followed a second later. And then there was light. It was like those scenes from Star Wars where the starships enter hyperspace and reality stretches around them and turns bright white.
Stepping through that rip brought on a similar sensation. Though I found myself standing still, I got the feeling that I was in motion. Always moving. Moving forward. To where? Well, that was anyone’s guess. Although I knew to whom I was moving toward. I was going toward her, speeding across space in a tunnel of ethereal silver flames dancing all around me. Sparkling. Glittering. Shimmering. Mesmerizing. The little silver flecks burrowed into my hair and flew out of it again, hair that now looked fire red as it drank in the brightness around it. Impossibly, a soft wind seemed to tug at the strands, pulling it out of my face and backwards as if the tunnel was possessed of its own internal draft.
But there was nothing strange about the breeze at all. It was a draft; a draft caused by air flowing from one point—the church—to the other. The other point. I could see it now, a dark spot in a tunnel of silver light. The only other place any wind could go to, or come from. The only other place I could go to. Turning back wasn’t an option. Not now. Not while I was in transit. I didn’t know this on a conscious level; I just knew it in the same way one knows that once an elevator is told to go down or up, you can’t make it change direction until it’s done what it was supposed to do.
My only hope now, as I closed in on the black spot—or it came to me—, was that the person on the other side of it couldn’t see the light punching a hole in the fabric of reality. It was a dumb hope, sure. Because at the root of my nervousness, the catalyst of my almost need to throw up, was that Acheris knew what we were about to do and that she would be waiting for us, ready to strike just as soon as we crossed through the portal.
That we were walking into a trap.
But then I blinked, and the light was gone. The air was cold and dry and tasted conditioned. At the edge of my senses I could smell perfume; that kind of sweet, almost sickeningly sweet, aroma synonymous with youth. But there was also the heady scent of freshly snuffed candles and that, combined with the silence, was what made my flesh prickle all over.
When my eyesight returned—should’ve kept my eyes closed in that tunnel after all—, barely an instant after stepping through to what I believed was the other side of the portal, I could see shapes starting to form around me. A long, curved couch. A bar. Stools. A long table. And at the far end of the room I was in, a wall-window looking out over the Berlin skyline, the TV clearly visible against the stark night sky. Only, at second glance, it wasn’t the TV tower at all; it was the Space Needle.
I’m… in… Seattle? There I was expecting a castle or a dungeon.
There was something else to see here while the sands of time moved at a snail’s pace. It was a flicker of light I had at first glance believed to be a distant fork of lightning that drew my eye. But it was the sudden realization that the light wasn’t actually outside of the wall-to-wall curved window of this penthouse apartment, but rather inside the suite that stole my attention.
Then the lightning came in a mighty flash that lit up the sky and the room, and that’s when I saw the thing that chilled me. The thing that poked at the base of my spine like a finger of ice, and then stepped along its length disk by disk until finally the cold arrived at my neck and caused me to stiffen. A great big pentacle was lying on the polished mahogany floor. This one had a black candle at each of its five points, and a blood-red ribbon in favor of a white one. A flicker of green crackled a few feet above the center of the pentacle. A portal… and it was closing.
Hot fear leaped up into my throat and I dashed across the room, hurdling over the couch, running, sprinting toward the trickle of light which looked more now like a snake’s tongue, flicking and tasting the air around it. And I plunged my hand into fissure to grab the snake’s tongue and not let it go, but I was too slow
.
“Amber?” Collette’s voice startled me.
I spun around, eyes wide and at the height of terror, the ball of hot bile still in my throat. “We’ve left them. We’ve left them alone!”
Collette drew in a deep breath.
“The fissure!” I yelled. I could still see it, my way back, the elevator waiting for me to tell it to go down, glowing and shining against the stark black background of the dark, empty penthouse suite. Collette turned, and by the time she did I was already beyond her, already running down the Moon Fire corridor, but no matter how hard my legs pushed the distance didn’t seem to close any faster.
It had been a trap. Oh Gods, it had been a trap! Only it wasn’t the trap I had thought it would be. She knew we would be coming, somehow—maybe she had seen the future, or maybe the devil himself told her we would be coming—and all the while she had been concocting a plan of her own. And while I was taking my white light elevator ride to her, she was passing silently next to us like a thief in the night. She had timed it perfectly, down to the God-damned second, but she had made a crucial mistake.
I had been nervous before and my nerves may have impaired my ability to think, giving her an edge. Now I was pissed, and the anger had dissolved the nerves like an aspirin in water.
The distant dark speck in the tunnel appeared before me again, a black pinprick steadily growing in size until it was a hole as big as a baseball, as big as a basketball… three, two, one.
I blinked.
This time there was no moment of disorientation. The clash of Magick, the smell of candle smoke, and the sounds of battle came all at once, like a solid wall of sensory input. I blinked again and found myself standing before a crucifix with an image of Christ, with his bleeding wounds, looking down on me.
I threw myself to the ground just as a swift, sharp object came swinging around in a wide ark, cutting across the space where my head had been a second ago. Hitting the ground on the palms of my hands, I craned my neck and took a swipe at the figure standing behind me, hooking the heel of my right foot into the back of his calf and sending him to his knees. He was a man wearing a hooded jacket, and his chilly, pallid gaze and heatless breathing reminded me all too much of one of the men I had encountered last year at home.
My heart was thundering in my head, beating with rabid ferocity, but the instincts had taken over. My attacker hadn’t dropped his knife when he hit the ground, but when I grabbed it with my mind he could do little to stop it from flying out of his hand and across the church. Then, from my position with my hands and knees on the floor, I pushed a jolt of telekinetic energy into my foot and drove it into the man’s chest. A direct hit—thump!—sent him sprawling to the ground at the foot of the altar as if he’d just been hit with a wrecking ball.
Around the area where the hooded man had landed, the space where the ritual pentacle had originally been set up—which was now no more than a mess of ribbon and turned over candles—, all hell had broken loose.
Luther, his hands wreathed in shadow, one of them clutching a blade of pure darkness, was fighting against one of the many hooded men in the Cathedral. To the right, two of the witches—Carolina and Regina—were chanting, holding hands, and causing another hooded man to levitate off the ground, helpless. But there were more hooded men than I could count, rushing around, circling the witches trying to fight them off. And fires had started; pews were burning, candles were melting, and smoke was starting to rise into the basilica.
I made a dash into the thick of it, whipping telekinetic Magick around as if I were holding onto two long, dangerous whips. I struck one hooded man in the back and sent him face first into a marble column. Another turned around to look at me, but my second whip came down on him hard and fast, striking him across the face and turning him into a human spinning top for an instant before he dropped.
I moved down the center aisle, striding fast and hard, to scan the church for signs of the others, but then a wave of hooded men came scrambling across the rows of pews on either side of me to converge in the middle until I was faced with a wall of advancing men. The Power was buzzing inside my chest, ready to strike, but there were too many of them. There were just too damn many of them!
One of them lunged forward and made a swipe for my face. I arched my back to avoid the blow and then threw the full force of my Power into his chest. The strike hit him with a bone-crunching thud that sent him sprawling into the group of men behind him like a bowling ball into a set of pins. I thought they were about to turn and run after seeing what I had just done to their comrade, but they held their ground… and then they started to slink back into the rows of pews.
At first I didn’t understand why, but when I saw the woman walking down the long aisle between them, I knew. I had never thought to visualize Acheris before, but I always had a feeling that I would know who she was. And when I saw this woman, I knew… it was her.
From a distance she looked no different to any other woman I had ever met. She was young, her hair was dark as night, she had elfin features, a thin waist and an ample bosom. There was beauty to her, yes. And youth. But there was something inherently wrong about her. When you looked at her closely you saw how abnormally grey her skin was—like the color of ash—, and you could also see how her black eyes looked like deep, deep holes; bottomless pits from which you might never get out of if you fell into them.
Something sucked the air out of my ears with a popping sound that left them ringing. The church suddenly fell eerily silent, though the free-for-all continued to rage all around. In that moment of first contact it was as if we were the only two people in the entire church, as if the chaos had paused and parted to allow us this moment.
Behind me, the flickering rip in the fabric of reality—the portal I had stepped through—persisted, flashes of light and licks of silver flame bursting out of it in strobes, but still; no Collette.
Acheris’s right hand came up slowly, hand clenched into a fist. Then it opened, and I saw the pentacle carved into her palm. The flesh was red and raw, like an open wound, the skin around the edges of the carving pink and sore. But there was something else in that pentacle; a patch of misshapen flesh at the center of it that seemed to be completely out of place.
Then the patch of flesh squirmed, an eye opened, blinked, and the Magick that came out of it hit me like a sledgehammer. The blast didn’t send me spiraling across the church; it seemed to come down on me at an angle with force enough to make me stagger several feet and then collapse onto my back. And then the cultists started to come.
I sent my Magick whips of telekinetic Power out in a wide arc around me, catching one of the men in the shoulder hard enough to knock him down. But there were too many of them. One man grabbed my arm, another grabbed my foot. I squirmed and kicked, but soon enough they had overpowered me and were carrying me down the aisle, toward the altar.
They slammed me onto it and pinned me down, and before I could make any more Magick come out of me, Acheris was there, with her hands on my shoulders. The sick Magick flowing into me from contact with the palms of her hands caused my body to tense and stiffen to the point of paralysis. A terrified sweat broke out all over my forehead, and the hot panic pinched my throat.
Acheris climbed on top of me, knees to either side of my paralyzed body, and produced a knife from the small of her back.
“I had no idea the Red Witch would make this so easy for me,” she said, in a seductive, smooth voice. “It’s so very anticlimactic isn’t it?”
This is it, I thought as my heart hammered thumping beats into my head. I could almost see the knife coming down hard on my chest, piercing my ribcage and finding my heart. Death probably wouldn’t come instantly; it would ebb out of me slowly as the lack of oxygen to the brain brought on by the sudden stopping of my heart took my life away inch by inch. I would be able to see her smile, or laugh, or do whatever she wanted to do before the curtain fell.
But that wasn’t what she wanted.
Acher
is pulled the knife up to her lips, stuck her tongue out, and dug it into the soft tissue. There was a terrible squishing sound, and then blood came down trickling in warm droplets, falling over my paralyzed forehead, cheeks, and nose. I wanted to squirm, to scream, to kick and thrash and not let the blood get anywhere near my mouth, but I couldn’t move, could barely think, and my Magick wasn’t coming.
But then Acheris’s head spun around, hard and fast. She scowled, and that’s when I saw the tendrils of inky blackness spreading through the air as if through water. One coil of darkness lashed out at the first body it could find and wrapped itself around him; and when I traced the writhing thing to its source, I saw Collette.
She had barely crossed the threshold and her Necromantic Magick was already spilling out of her like an inky black beast. I watched her pale skin peel away revealing only thick shadow, blacker than black, until all that was left of Collette was a dark shape vaguely retaining the figure of a woman, with pale blue orbs for eyes; orbs that shone with the cold light of dead stars.
Another black tendril shot out of Collette’s shadow form and went darting across the church, then another, and another, her power spreading like ink in water and finding its mark upon the hooded men assailing the witches in the Berlin Cathedral.
My eyes went to Acheris, who was watching on with amusement; that wolf’s grin still plastered on her face.
“Look at you, all grown up,” Acheris said. She craned her neck to look at me. “Now that she’s busied my men, how about you and I see if the prophecy really is true?”
“Why don’t you let me go and we find out?” I asked. I can speak? I didn’t question it.
Acheris hovered off me and landed about ten feet away, at the foot of the altar. Around her, the fire was spreading and raging. Time was running out.
I straightened my back, righted my body to face her, clenched my hands into tight balls, and let my Power fill me with warmth. I thought of Aaron, of Damien and Frank, thought of Collette and all the witches that were depending on me. The pressure came down hard, like an iron weight descending upon a wooden plank balancing between two stones. But I couldn’t crack. Not now.