by Renée Jaggér
The fuchsia-haired sorceress dragged herself to her knees. When she opened her eyes, a doorway of deep purple light glimmered almost directly in front of her.
Lavonne tittered. “You are free to go. Free to go far, far away from us and our business.”
Shannon scrambled on hands and knees into the portal. Once she vanished beyond it and was safely back in the mortal world, Lavonne dispelled the doorway, confident that even Shannon DiGrezza would not be stupid enough to attempt to come back into the Other anytime soon.
The three Venatori turned around, staring back the way they’d come and beyond—toward the Pool of Dark Reflections.
Bailey and Roland sat together, leaning against one another, unspeaking for the moment. They were no longer atop the raised plane near the lake. They had descended the slope and now sat on the shore before the pool.
It made no sense. The black water had killed Aida and nearly killed them, but there were rules in the Other, and they were beginning to make sense.
The pool, whatever its true nature, only spawned the mist creatures when too much magic was channeled nearby. Smaller, subtler acts of sorcery only resulted in strange visions, like Bailey’s duel against her own reflection.
And right now, neither of them felt like using any magic at all.
“Hey,” the girl said. “This occurred to me last time we were in here, but I don’t think we discussed it.”
Roland raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“All this time,” she elaborated, “we’ve been in here, we haven’t had to eat or drink or even pee. Makes me wonder what else is different. Hell, did I ask about that before?”
The wizard shrugged. “I can’t remember; so much has happened lately. But yes, it does seem like our biology isn’t functioning the way it would back on Earth. It’s strange, because we’ve been sweating from the exertion, so you’d think we’d need to drink water to replenish the moisture. But I don’t feel thirsty at all.”
“Me neither.” Actually, having said that, she found herself picturing a nice glass of ice water. Sounded good right about now. Not necessary, but she wouldn’t have minded one.
She banished the thought. If they didn’t need to drink, dwelling on beverages was nothing more than a distraction.
“So,” she went on, “do you think there’s something along those lines that Marcus means for us to figure out, too? Like, we haven’t slept, either, but I’m pretty sure we’ve been here now for days. Could be.”
“That, too,” said Roland, “is hard to say. Based on what I read and heard about the Other when I was younger, there was a vague consensus that the laws of nature were more like guidelines, and that the human experience within the place was highly subjective. In other words, it’s different for everyone. But I wonder, how could it be personal when both of us are experiencing the same thing right now?”
Neither of them could answer that one.
Bailey gave it a shot, regardless. “Maybe, since each of us is part of the other’s perception, as long as we’re together, we’re, like, collaborating to create the experience. Right now it’s our reality, but if it was just me, it’d be my reality. Something like that.”
“That could be,” Roland acceded. “Again, even though I’m awesome, I’m not an expert on this place or its inner workings.”
“Eh,” Bailey countered, “I don’t know about awesome. You’re pretty good, at least.”
He sighed. “Gosh, thanks. Seriously, though, you might be on to something. And it’s odd that this lake has drawn us back to sit by it, even though…ugh, it’s not a nice place.”
She could tell he was thinking about Aida. Bailey still didn’t know the whole backstory of what had gone on between him and those three witches, but he’d known them personally in some capacity before Bailey had ever met him. And now she was gone—probably dead, or worse than dead.
He snapped out of it, though. “What you said makes me wonder if the mere presence of another person alters the Other’s reality. If so, what would happen if we tried channeling next to the water here, like your vision earlier? Would it be different if you had me around?”
Bailey started. She had no desire to go through that again, but the wizard had made a good point. And Marcus had, she recalled, had made sure to isolate her before the experience.
“Shit,” she breathed. “I think you’re onto something too. I just, well, I worry that that might make it worse. Like, we might hallucinate that the other is god-knows-what and then try to kill each other.”
Frowning, Roland rubbed his chin. “It’s one of the many risks we incur by being here, but Marcus isn’t back yet, and I feel like we still have more to accomplish. If all else fails, I can try to open a portal back to Greenhearth, but I’ve never done that before, so there would be significant risks. Let’s try the pool again and see what happens.”
Bailey took a deep breath. “Okay, but if I end up wringing your neck, it’s your fault.”
He scratched his nose. “Deal.”
Holding hands, shoulders touching as they sat, they turned their gazes toward the sable water and concentrated on magic, trying to draw their powers slowly and deliberately through the pool.
It didn’t take long.
Bailey suddenly felt as though she were sitting there alone. She couldn’t feel Roland against her side or his hand in hers, nor could she see him out of the corner of her eye. The entire universe seemed to have shrunk to her and the black pool.
Then the surface bubbled and a form rose out of it. She tensed up, the déjà vu of a nightmare repeating itself almost making her sick. At the same time, she’d defeated the doppelganger the first time. She could do it again if she had to.
But this time, everything was different.
The dark reflection of herself, the evil doppelganger-Bailey, was far less frightening and seemed weaker. It hesitated to attack her; cringed, really.
And then Bailey lost it. She couldn’t stand herself being that weak, so she attacked it.
The doppelganger tried to fight back, alternately raging and pleading, much the way Shannon was fond of doing. Surging anger compelled Bailey to fight even harder, to totally dominate this pathetic creature and stamp it out of existence, to kill and crush and destroy.
The reflection reeled under the girl’s assault, a mixture of blasts of magic and mundane physical thrashing. The fight became a massacre, a one-sided act of violence on Bailey’s part—her revenge for the tougher fight earlier.
Is this what I was so afraid of? she mused, laughing at the notion. Given her strength and power, there was no reason to fear. No, others should fear her.
The doppelganger, badly burned and beaten, stumbled to its knees, and Bailey punched it in the face. She then jumped on top of it, stomping it into the ground, and it was gone. She’d won. She’d removed the wretched creature from reality.
The world spun, and her vision seemed to perceive different sights, far from the pool. She saw herself as the pack alpha to end all alphas, the ultimate badass conqueror before whom all fell to their knees. She saw bloodshed and heard screams caused by her.
She saw herself doing whatever the hell she wanted, when she wanted, with no one strong enough to oppose her. She laughed and jeered and bared her teeth in savage grins of triumph, heedless of the effects on the rest of the world.
Could she really leave responsibility behind? Was it possible to grow so powerful that the rules and standards of basic decency no longer applied?
She saw herself answering that question with a resounding yes, and thrilled to say so, tearing her way through a world that could not resist her.
She saw her town destroyed and in flames. She saw her brothers and Roland struck down, dead or dying, and other pitiful humans wracked with pain and fear. Her body lay twisted and broken in the center of the hazy scene of carnage, and above it, beings of incredible power—greater even than hers—duked it out for supremacy, as though her actions had convinced the gods to descend from on high.
“No,” she gasped.
She saw herself, crying with the anguish of abject guilt for having the power to stop all the horror but choosing not to. And then she saw nothing, the world fading to black.
Roland struggled. Every move he tried to make, the weight of his power dragged him down. It was like possessing a hammer large enough to smash anything in the world to bits but barely being able to lift it.
Figures were advancing. He knew and yet did not know who and what they were. Their faces were obscured and their identities were beyond his perception, but minor details like that didn’t seem to matter.
He knew that whoever they were, they had arrived to punish him for sticking his head up too high. They were the people he had always known would come after him—the monsters who punished naughty children.
He tried to summon his powers—his vast, oh-so-special arcane potential—and found it unavailable. The years he had pretended to be weaker and more average than he was had compressed into a ball and chain that left him all but defenseless.
He wasn’t allowed to use his powers. It would draw too much attention, and someone might get hurt. People would envy and resent him. Best to just shove it down into a deep dark hole, downplay its existence, throw a rug over the trapdoor where it was hidden.
Now they were coming, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
“Goddammit,” he moaned. “You all lied to me. I’m useless. Look at me. I can’t do anything.”
Mist-demons dragged Aida, whom he’d known, albeit only as an acquaintance, for years, past him to her doom. He couldn’t stop it, but already that faded as he saw Bailey lying helplessly on the ground before him, reaching up for help, as they closed in.
By now, the advancing figures were somewhat clearer. They were the Venatori—that much he knew—but they were more than that. They were everyone who’d ever warned him about what would happen if he rocked the boat. They were the judgment of the entire ancient society of witches and wizards.
They were coming to kill both him and Bailey.
A purplish-magenta blast—no particular element, just raw magical plasma—seared past him, singeing the hairs on the side of his head. Then other such bursts shot toward him and toward the powerless form of the girl at his feet.
Struggling to move his limbs, he barely managed to defend them both, deflecting the attacks from Bailey and absorbing the ones thrown at him. He retaliated in kind, hurling bolts of green magic at his adversaries, who now seemed to number in the hundreds and had surrounded them on all sides.
Back and forth they fought. Roland held his own at first, but slowly, inexorably lost in a battle of attrition. Horribly, it seemed that Bailey had died at some point and he hadn’t even noticed. The vibrant girl had been replaced by a corpse while he was distracted.
“No. For fuck’s sake, no!”
Then one of the searing beams tore through his lower abdomen along the side, scattering boiling droplets of blood and charred bits of his guts. There was no pain, just the unbearable realization, while darkness closed in, that he had failed.
Chapter Eleven
“No.”
They uttered the word in unison. Then their eyes snapped open, staring straight ahead yet seeing each other—finally—in their peripheral vision. They felt their shoulders and hands touching, and each heard the other breathe.
Bailey looked at the wizard. After a second or two, he looked back. She put her arms around him and held him close, feeling him tremble.
“Jesus,” he almost hissed. “That was unpleasant.”
“Yeah,” Bailey agreed in a far softer voice than usual, “it was. Do me a favor, and don’t ask me about it this time.”
Another shudder went through him. “Sure, in exchange for the same.”
“Deal.” She squeezed his hand.
They sat like that for some time, until at length they calmed down and found the strength to stand up. Roland went first.
“I think,” he offered, “we need to get away from this fucking pool.”
Bailey had no intention of arguing with him about that. “Does this mean we failed the test?” she wondered. “Shit. Where’s Marcus when you need him? I’m starting to wonder if this is the actual test. Nightmare shit from the pool, then having to figure out what the hell to do next all by ourselves.”
“Probably,” the wizard grumbled. “He’d teach a toddler how to shoot by giving him a loaded submachine gun and turning him loose in a mall. Sorry, that’s a bit excessive, maybe, but I’m really starting to wonder what’s going on here.”
The girl furrowed her brow and said nothing. She understood where Roland was coming from, but she still trusted the shaman. He had his reasons, surely.
They climbed the ridge away from the shadowy lake and wandered off at a ninety-degree angle from it through a patch of swampy woodland that wasn’t too dense. If wraiths attacked, they’d have a second or two to react.
Nothing bothered them, though. It was like they walked through a land devoid of any life but them and the gnarled black trees, and it suited them just fine. While they recovered, they had no desire to share the Other with anyone else.
When they’d gone some distance, perhaps a mile, the woods thinned, but the trees grew larger. They towered over them, forming a great dome with their branches over a flat patch of earth overgrown with pale, snaky weeds lightly covered with a thin sheen of silvery mist.
“Hmm,” Roland quipped, “I like the looks of this place. Kind of cool. Want to stop here?”
“Okay,” she said. “And yeah, it’s interesting. Like a natural temple or something.”
They paused, doing nothing at first, then spontaneously starting to trade magical exercises—minor stuff similar to the electrical-circuit thing they’d done previously. It gave them something to do that felt constructive.
Different elements joined electricity and fire in the roster of things they could channel together. They played catch with a ball of mist, each keeping it formed into a perfect sphere and launching it at the other in a symmetrical rhythm.
“This,” Bailey remarked, “is kind of fun. It’s nice to be able to practice magic without a bunch of fuckheads trying to eat our souls or whatever.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Roland agreed. “Let’s spice things up a bit.”
After “catching” the mist-ball and throwing it back, he snapped his fingers and the vapor condensed into ice.
Bailey caught the frozen orb with her hands, then pitched it at him like a softball—electrocuting the water in the same motion. “Try this on for size,” she challenged.
Roland stopped the now-hazardous mass in midair and cracked it in half like a melon. He let the frozen pieces fall to the ground and held the electricity in place, a sparking agglomeration of ball lightning.
He glanced around. “Let’s see if we can set up a quadruple circuit. Like, I throw the current through that tree over there, then double it back to your left hand, then you throw it through that tree opposite us, then back to me. We’ll form kind of a figure eight.”
The girl hesitated. “Won’t that kill the trees?”
“Not necessarily,” he replied. “Well, I don’t know. If it hurts them, we can stop. Wouldn’t want to destroy the place.”
“Amen,” agreed Bailey.
The wizard stretched the floating ball of lightning into a thin bolt and cast it into the first of the trees he’d indicated. He took a second to “feel” the structure of the mighty plant, and then the bolt zapped back toward Bailey.
She caught it with her left hand and tossed it toward the other tree. Once it struck, she struggled to do as Roland had done—sense the composition of the target so she could loop the electrical charge toward Roland.
But she screwed it up. The current shot out of her in both directions.
“Hey!” Roland exclaimed, stumbling back as he barely saved himself from a nasty shock. Meanwhile, the tree sparked and smoked where the bolt had struck.
Bailey blushed. “Crap. Sorry. Guess I should have asked how the hell you use a tree as a relay before we started.”
The wizard stood up and brushed himself off. “You just move the electricity through the water and sense the positive and negative charges in it, the same as with any other living thing,” he stated as though this were obvious. “Though trees and humans—or werewolves, close enough—are pretty different.”
“Well,” the girl shot back, “I’m still getting better. Hell, we both are. Magic is starting to come easy, even in this godforsaken place.”
“Indeed,” Roland agreed. “Let’s take a short break, then wander back toward that hill by the lake. If Marcus is back by now, he might expect us to be there.”
Neither of them was keen to be anywhere near the pool, but they were both more than ready to return to Earth. The easier it was for the shaman to find them, the quicker that would happen.
Time passed; as usual, their minds could not determine how much. As tired as they were, it was all too easy to fall into a complacent stupor. Had their senses and their alertness been sharper, they would not have been as shocked as they were when they rounded a clump of gnarled trees and came to a relatively open patch of muddy ground not far from the hillock and the lake.
Standing before them was a welcoming committee comprised of ten or twelve men. Neither of the pair recognized any individuals amongst the group, but Bailey pegged them as Weres.
Blinking and coming to a halt, Roland demanded, “Who the heck are you guys?”
An old bearded man with broad sloping shoulders stood near the front of the crowd. “We are the Juniper Pack,” he stated in a deep yet wheezing voice. He looked not at the wizard, but at the werewitch. “You must be Bailey Nordin. Is this correct?”
In Bailey’s head, danger signals went off, but she kept her cool. “Yeah. I’ve heard of you guys. You live in the mountains somewhere south of us. Never been down there. Why are you here?”