“Do you think the hit she took knocked her out?” Damien asked.
“Maybe,” Lily said, “How hard do you think she hit the wall?”
Damien didn’t like thinking about it, didn’t enjoy picturing Natalie getting struck by a bolt of energy and hurled into a solid wall. He hadn’t seen it happen, but his imagination filled in the blanks. Crack. That was the sound her body had made when it hit the wall.
“Hard,” he said, “I’d be surprised if nothing’s broken. Can you reach for her? If she’s just knocked out, I mean.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Lily said, considering.
“Do it. Please.”
Lily nodded and sat on the bed next to Natalie. Damien watched as she placed her hand on the side of Natalie’s face that wasn’t touching the pillow and closed her eyes. He had never seen Lily do this before, but he knew she could. Her Power was mostly psychic. Damien could command the elements—mostly the West—but Lily could perform telepathic and telekinetic feats with her mind that would leave most Witches with their jaws hanging wide.
She was a telepath, a telekinetic, and an astral traveler; and if she concentrated hard enough, she could even peel away the layers of this world to glimpse the shady world of the dead. But hers was all quiet work. There was no flash to her magick, no whipping winds or rumbling thunder; only the still, steady breathing and the occasional whispered words.
Lily inhaled deeply, held her breath, and then exhaled. Damien watched, his body taut with anticipation, his heart pumping hard in his hands folded at his chest. She did it again, and then a third time. At the fourth, she didn’t exhale, and didn’t exhale, and didn’t exhale.
Despite the sensitivity of the situation, he couldn’t help but admire how beautiful his sister looked. She had been the cavalry tonight; a knight with hair that fell about her shoulders in curly brown waves, tattoos on her shoulders, and sculpted elfin features. She and Damien could have been twins, only he didn’t like letting his hair grow too long.
Twins, he thought, and smiled.
She exhaled and shook her head, then whipped around to look at her brother. “I can’t reach her,” she said, her face grave.
“Wh-what does that mean?”
“It means she’s gone, Damien. I don’t know where she is.”
“Gone? Gone from her body?”
“I don’t know. I think she might still be in there, but it’s like something’s stopping her from coming back up.”
“Something,” Damien said, “It wasn’t something that hit her, Lily, it was a man with beam of light.”
“There must have been something inside the light,” Lily said.
She stood upright, moved away from the bed and into the kitchen, and helped herself to a glass of water. Damien was parched and his voice was going hoarse, but he didn’t want to have a drink right now. He wanted Natalie to wake up, that was all; for her to wake up from this awful nightmare night.
“Something inside the light?” Damien asked, “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “It must have been a hex. A powerful one.”
A hex meant for me. “Why would someone just do that?”
“That’s what we’re going to have to find out.”
“How? We have no idea who this guy is or where he’s gone. It could have been Brian or Henry, but he could be anywhere and I’m no diviner.”
“Divining won’t help anyway. If this guy is even half good he will have protection spells around him to stop us from just looking for him.”
“So then what can we do?”
Lily paused, wrinkled her face in thought, and then downed what remained of her glass of water. “We aren’t going to take her to the hospital,” she said, “A doctor isn’t going to help her. In fact, he’ll only ask questions we can’t answer.”
Damien nodded, but he still didn’t understand how they were going to figure out what the Witch had done to Natalie. “Are we just going to wait, then?” he asked.
“Waiting isn’t an option. We have to go inside.”
“Inside?”
“If there’s something stopping Natalie from waking up, we have to go inside her mind and find it.”
He swallowed hard. “You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the only way. Even if I could reach for it from outside, I wouldn’t want to risk pulling it out of her. For all we know the process could hurt her, or even kill her. We have to go inside, Damien. It’s the only way.”
Damien thought about it for a moment, hesitating. He remembered the cinnamon and honey scent she had given off at the bistro and now remembered how it had been missing when he carried her unconscious body through the alley.
Lily was right. There was no other way.
CHAPTER 4
“Have you ever done this before?”
Damien was standing over the bed where Natalie slept, watching Lily as she produced a bag of glinting, gleaming stones from a tiny purple pouch. She had sounded confident enough when she suggested they somehow enter Natalie’s mind and find whatever was keeping her under. But he had heard the stones click and clack together a little too erratically as she handled them and, for an instant, started to have doubts.
Lily shook her head. “Never,” she said.
“Never?”
“I’ve gone into the Astral before, but never into someone else’s mind.”
“So you don’t really know what’s going to happen in there, do you?”
“I don’t. It’s going to be weird and uncomfortable, probably even dangerous, but what choice do we have?”
None. That’s what choice they had. “What is it that’s going to happen to us exactly?”
Lily went about the process of carefully placing a few of the lighter shaded rocks around Natalie’s head. The stones had magical properties, Damien knew, although he didn’t know them as well as he would have wanted. Amethyst, he recognized, and also Onyx. But there were others he didn’t recognize, including a fiery red stone that caught his eye. A Ruby? It seemed too orange to be a Ruby.
“First,” Lily said, “We’re going to meditate. Then I’m going to pull your consciousness out of your body and gently weave it into Natalie’s. When you’re there, I’m going to project myself into the Astral and you’re going to call me with this stone.”
She handed him the red stone. It was warm to the touch and the colors seemed to shift like fire. It felt like the warm embrace of a hearth on a cold night. “What is it?” he asked.
“Natural Baltic Amber,” she said, “You’re going to take it with you.”
“Take it with me?”
“Ever had a dream where you squeezed something in your hand so tight that when you woke up you could swear it was still there? This is like that, but in reverse.”
The idea made Damien’s head spin, but the stone… it seemed to sing to him from someplace far away. Like a voice thrown across a lake. Whose voice he couldn’t tell, but something inside of him sang back. He would never forget the warm wave that rushed through him as he handled the stone in his hand.
“Alright,” he said, “I’m ready.”
Lily nodded and stood up, gesturing for Damien to sit where she had been a moment ago. Some of the rocks shifted with the sudden slump Damien’s weight brought on the bed, but Lily put them back into place. Each, after all, had a purpose—and each had to be exactly where it was needed when Lily was ready to call on it.
“Give me your hands,” she said, and Damien did. “I need you to concentrate. Clear your mind of everything that’s happened tonight; remove all doubt, all worry, all fear. Your thoughts have to be completely gone. Listen only to my voice and do as I’m about to tell you. Understand?”
Damien nodded.
“Hold the Amber tight in your hand,” Lily said, “And think of the beach. Listen to the water washing the sand, smell the salt in the air, feel the warm summer breeze.”
Water was the Element of the West – his element. His Guardian wore the shape of a thousand casca
ding waterfalls and spoke with all the fury of a sea storm. He felt most at home near the ocean, so he imagined the water and let the wash, the salt, and the breeze fill his senses.
When he closed his eyes he saw the San Francisco bay. He thought of the rocks where he had been waiting for Natalie earlier on and remembered the scent of the sea; the salt, the brine, the algae on the rocks. As the moment passed, he started to hear sounds now too; gulls flying overhead, the clinking of bells, the lapping of water on wood. He wasn’t thinking these sounds now, he knew. They were just… there. Maybe Lily was responsible for them, but he couldn’t even hear Lily’s voice anymore. His mind was starting to drift, to float like cinders caught in an updraft.
The only thing real to him, and solid, was the Amber in his hand.
Damien.
The voice was soft and distant, like the echo of a whisper, but it jerked him awake all the same. Had it been Natalie or Lily who said it? It had been a woman, to be sure, but which he couldn’t say. Nor did he know where he was. He couldn’t remember lying down on the bed but he was lying down now, only the bed was empty.
Damien propped himself up with his elbows and rubbed his eyes as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep. He could still hear the gulls and the bells and the lapping, but as his eyes adjusted he was aware of a shift in the light. No longer was he in a candlelit bedroom with purple walls. He was on a boat now, in a cabin. The morning sun spilled into the room so bright it almost blinded him.
Covering his eyes, Damien rose to his feet and held on to a nearby cabinet for support. The boat was rocking, he could tell, and when he went to the window he could see the Golden Gate Bridge to one side—standing majestically high above the water; impossibly high, almost—and Alcatraz on the other.
He suddenly remembered the stone he had been clutching, and when he remembered it, he found it in the palm of his hand, catching the sun’s rays and throwing them about the room in beautiful amber shafts. It really does look like fire, he thought, fire captured in resin.
“Damien.”
The voice came again, only this time it had substance; felt real. That’s when he spun around and saw her, Lily, standing in the room with him. She must have come in from the deck because she hadn’t been inside the room when he woke up. Or maybe she had been there all along and he just hadn’t noticed. She was smiling, then, and looked as beautiful as ever.
“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 5
“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.