Paranormal After Dark

by Rebecca Hamilton

  And freedom is bitter.

  Epilogue

  ANIELA LIVED IN a perpetual confusion of déjà vu. Sometimes, her memories overwhelmed her, and sometimes they faded into nothingness, and sometimes they drew nearer, like a recurring dream, until they overtook her and unfolded in the present. It was called precognizance, before-knowing, and for some, it came as visions or as an inexplicable certainty, but for Aniela, it was memory, and her past mingled with her future until the two were all but indistinguishable.

  Sometimes, though, she realized in time that her memory was yet to come.

  She left suddenly in the middle of winter, when the memory solidified enough for her to be sure. She did that sort of thing, sometimes, disappearing to see to her shipping lines, meet with investors, bargain with the Others. This time, though, she left wearing cargo pants and heavy-soled boots, with a short saber strapped to her hip and some sort of paleo-Slavic talisman on a thong around her neck, and so Jerzy and Ewa let her go without comment. She did not ask for their company, and they did not offer it.

  She left instructions, though:

  Kimberly Reed, New England, wizard. Locate telephone number. Offer to meet in any preferred neutral location. Speak English.

  The memory led her to the garage, into her car, and from the garage to her private hangar. There was somewhere she had to be, somewhere far away. She tried to focus, but the future-memory collided with a past-memory.

  She met Yekaterina in 1712, and the encounter was not friendly, but it was interesting. The younger woman was poaching, killing deep inside the territory Aniela claimed, and Aniela drove her away. It had happened before, that need to defend her land and her people, and that should have been the end of it, but Yekaterina had returned.

  Her little Cessna wouldn’t do, Aniela decided. Her destination was too far away, though she still could not see it clearly. She returned to the car and drove for the airport, instead. If she hurried, she could be there in time to catch one of her own planes. Stowing away was still illegal, of course, but preferable to trespassing. The flight crew need never know she was there. The only question was which plane.

  She drove in silence to the Port Lotniczy Gdańsk im. Lecha Wałęsy.

  Aniela had been gone when Yekaterina arrived, and the younger woman had waited on the doorstep with incredible patience. She stood and smiled and showed great respect, and though Aniela knew very well to be careful of the Others, this one made no hostile move.

  “Someone told me about you,” Yekaterina had said, her voice marking her as foreign. “You still think the way the breathers think. You never take life. Is it true?”

  “We never kill,” Aniela confirmed. “And if you mean to stay, you will abide by the same rule.”

  Yekaterina shook her head in bewilderment. “Why?” But it was curiosity, not contempt, that Aniela had seen in her eyes. “Teach me.”

  Aniela slipped onto the tarmac unseen and hid between hangars while she struggled to remember. She was looking for one of her cargo planes, she knew. She remembered boarding and riding in the freezing fuselage between the rows of freight.

  It was not uncommon that a future-memory would refuse to crystallize until it was nearly upon her, and it sometimes led her into danger. But she was prepared. She had her saber and a pistol beneath her jacket and other, more organic weapons she could use if the need arose.

  She spied an aircraft registration that seemed a little more than familiar and sprinted across the tarmac, quick as a shot and faster than the human eye could follow, to slip in among the shipping crates. She huddled in the smallest space she could find and closed her eyes, focusing on the memory.

  Yekaterina was fascinating. She had no moral sense and no guilt, but unlike so many of the Others, she still remembered, and it took little convincing to show her that she had been changed. Her fury was terrible, when the realization sank in. More startling was her sudden, violent determination to change back.

  “I never wanted this,” she hissed through clenched teeth, face obscured by wild hair. “It was awful at first, but I accepted it. Only I didn’t, did I? It made me. Nothing I’ve done or thought since then has been my choice.”

  Aniela tried to talk her down, but seeing a demon weep was more horrible than seeing a demon rage, and Aniela held her until the storm passed. Yekaterina became a valuable asset, at once nearly a friend and more than a friend. She followed with fierce precision the rules Aniela laid out, perfecting a rigid mimicry of compassion, of mercy. She never killed. She saved life on occasion. She withered in frustration.

  “I can do it,” she confessed one night in front of the fire. “I can do the things, the actions. But I’ll never feel it. I’ll never live as you do because it feels right, only because you tell me it ought, and I trust you. Every day is a struggle for me.”

  “Everyone struggles,” Aniela replied. “That’s what free will is.” But she knew that was not what Yekaterina meant. She kissed the younger woman’s cheek and stroked her hair, and was not surprised the day she woke and found the house empty.

  Two centuries later, the plane touched down somewhere in North America, and Aniela followed her memory west. The further she traveled, the more the weather bit into her, and she was glad of the heating elements installed in her absurdly expensive underclothes. While her cheeks froze and cracked, the rest of her moved smoothly over mountains and across plains, fighting the weariness of long motion.

  Aniela was not surprised to find Yekaterina gone, but she was surprised to receive the letter.

  I felt something, it said. Not much and not long, but I did something because I felt it was right. Without you to tell me, I cannot be sure that I felt correctly; however, I greatly desire to feel it again. I defer to you in these matters, and when I have seen the consequences of my actions, I shall write again to request your insight.

  She waited impatiently the months it took the next letter to arrive, and she tried to follow it back to its source, but the trail was cold by the time it reached her.

  I have attached myself to a human child who interests me. He is deaf to all sounds but my voice and to certain other stimuli, which I cannot hear. For that reason, I thought him unbalanced, but after observing him, I believe that the other voices he hears are those of the unquiet dead. His family likewise believes him insane, but I dare not reveal myself to them to correct them. Having been born deaf or in some way injured very young, he is unable to speak, but I understand his intent all the same, just as well as if he had spoken to me. It is strange how well I trust him, despite his young age and the peculiarity of his senses. His family calls him Leonid, but he has allowed me to call him Lyonya.

  Do not be angry with me, dearest Aniela, for feeling now what I know you wished I could feel for you. I enjoyed your company always, but I remained for selfish reasons, for my own pleasure. I stay here for a boy more fragile even than most mortals, who needs a defender. I hope that you can be proud of me for this.

  Aniela kept all the letters, from the first sent by mounted courier to the last sent by zeppelin and postmarked from Berlin. She kept the one the boy wrote from New Mexico in the shuddering aftermath of the war, three poorly penned words – She loved you – in response to the lengthy consolation she had sent, and still did not know whether that had been intended as comfort or accusation. He had not signed it, and she had never found out what name the immigration officers gave young Leonid when he spread his roots into American soil. Smith, she had supposed. New Americans all ended up as Smiths.

  She knew the boy inside and out, through Yekaterina’s letters.

  She knew him well enough to recognize him when she found him, or what was left, half-buried in Alaska’s hard-frozen coastline.

  There was a remote possibility that it had been a person at one point, but at some point between then and now, it had become a mummy. There was nothing to it but skin and bones, wrapped in what had once been blue jeans and the disgusting rags of a cotton shirt. It was curled up tight, knees dr
awn up to its chest, skeletal hands clutching at the remains of its shirt, joints hard locked by desiccation. She had seen healthier-looking things dug from desert pit burials. Those tended to be black, though; skin decays and darkens, just like leather, when it has been out in the elements for a while. This thing was bone-white under the layers of filth.

  He had tried to cross the ocean, she guessed. She knew what it was to be hurt so badly she could not heal herself, to be drawn inexorably home to rest in her native soil. There was power in the earth, as much power as in blood. The earth was life. When there was nothing left inside to distract, no thought or want or hope or even thirst, the homesong called, and he had answered, but the water stood in his way.

  No more. Yekaterina’s boy deserved better.

  Aniela twisted her hands into talons and chipped the ice and frozen soil away from his body. It was a corpse, she realized with a shudder. More dead than undead. His spirit was elsewhere, perhaps too far away to return. The thing she held was empty. Still, it was the best she could do. She was no medium. She could not call back a spirit, only make sure it had a place to go if it chose to come back on its own.

  The return trip cost more in planes and fuel and bribes than all of Aniela’s shipping companies could make in a month, but it was worth it to get home quickly. If there was one thing he had aplenty, it was time, but every second he spent in that state was criminal. It was worth it to restore his body, taking all the precautions necessary when dealing with a medium. It was worth it to find the place of his birth and watch his body slip into the soil, there to heal. Yekaterina’s boy deserved that much.

  Aniela looked at the stiff form belted into the seat beside her. His skin was stretched tight and cracked in several places, but he had nothing left to bleed. His lips had pulled back in a terrible rictus, baring extended fangs, slightly crooked teeth, and a thick, leathery black tongue. His eyes struck her the hardest, though. One was about what she had expected – dried out, sunken, dull, and stained the dark red of starvation. The other bulged out of his face, straining against the tight skin of his eyelids, electric blue and crazy as hell.

  Outside the window, the jet engine roared. On the horizon, the lights of Gdansk spilled upward into space.

  “Soon,” she promised.

  * * *

  Want to read more in The Liminality Series?

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  About MR Graham

  MR Graham is a native Texan who traces strong cultural roots back to Scotland, Poland, England, and Germany. A mild-mannered Latin teacher during the day, Graham transforms at night into a raging Holmesian loremaster and rabid novelist.

  Though passionate about all scholarship and academia, Graham’s training and true love lies with anthropology, particularly the archaeological branch.

  Additionally, she seems to have a strange habit of talking about herself in the third person, even when it’s not situationally appropriate to do so.

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  THE COMPLETE BLOODLING SERIAL by AIMEE EASTERLING

  SHE WHO FIGHTS MONSTERS by KYOKO M

  ST. CHARLES AT DUSK by SARAH M. CRADIT

  WICKED BY NATURE by MADISON SEVIER

  UNDERLIFE by MARISSA FARRAR

  DRAGON’S REDEMPTION by EDEN ASHE

  MILAN’S RETURN by GRAE LILY

  THE BREAKERS CODE by CONNER KRESSLEY

  THE MEDIUM by MR GRAHAM

  WICCAN WARS by HEATHER MARIE ADKINS

  CARPE NOCTEM by KATIE SALIDAS

  A QUESTION OF FAITH by NICOLE ZOLTACK

  WICCAN WARS

  Wiccan Wars Trilogy, Book One

  BY HEATHER MARIE ADKINS

  Copyright © 2014 by Heather Marie Adkins

  Ever O’Connell prides herself on being a good Wiccan, and her coven follows the path of the Goddess with love and light. But the “dark” witches in school—the BlackMags— keep pushing her toward the edge, until Ever finally finds herself at war.

  Cade Bourdain inherited his father's thirst for power, drawing him into darker areas of magick. Despite his dislike for the “Fluffy Bunny” Wiccans, he feels an unearthly connection to Ever.

  When the two strike up a secret relationship the real magic between them is ignited, generating a power that a dangerous warlock yearns to take for his own. Ensnared by the warlock, Ever and Cade’s conflicting covens must work together despite their differences—or else be destroyed by a common enemy.

  The line between light and dark has never been so unclear.

  Wiccan Wars: Wiccan Wars Trilogy, Book One

  Copyright © 2014 by Heather Marie Adkins

  Published by CyberWitch Press, LLC

  Louisville, KY

  cyberwitchpress.com

  cyberwitchpress@gmail.com

  First edition, published January 2015

  All rights reserved.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional. The author humbly begs your pardon. This is fiction, people.

  Edited by Jennifer Jeffers | jjeffersediting.com

  Cover Art by Eden Crane | Eden Crane Designs

  Chapter 1

  EVER

  EVER O’CONNELL LOVED thunderstorms.

  There was something primal about them that seemed to push the freedom and power of nature into her very soul. She loved to dance barefoot in the rain and soak up that sensation — to feel her body inhabited by an energy much stronger than her own.

  Outside her bedroom window, the storm raged — black, roiling fury that hung low in the dim sky and threatened to erupt. A sharp crack heralded the split-second of white hot light that illuminated her bedroom. It was one of the things that drew her to this kind of weather — the duality. White and black. Hard and soft. Wet and dry. So much of life depended on opposites. The world itself was a living, breathing yin-yang.

  The first line of semi-severe storms had moved through the area less than an hour before, cutting the electricity. Not unusual — Tennessee couldn’t have a late October thunderstorm without losing the lights at least every third time. Electricity had a purely love-hate relationship with storms. It was the reason there were candles and flashlights stashed all over the house; her family was prepared.

  It wasn’t that Ever minded the darkness. The darkness had always called to her, beckoned to her like a mystery that begged to be unlocked. The dark had never posed a problem.

  It was the destruction that made her heart race.

  Thunderstorms could wreak havoc on the things she loved; Ever knew that all too well. Another example of duality — loving the storms, but fearing them, as well..

  If nothing else drew her to the Path, duality would be reason enough.

  Lighting the white pillar candle on her
desk, Ever took and released a breath before focusing on the tiny glow of the flame. A flame wasn’t just a flame — it held layers of color and energy that together formed the fire. Cool blue at the center — stable, steady. Orangey-yellow around that — protective, wary. And at the edge, white like lightning — unstable and destructive.

  Ever focused on the sapphire heart of the flame. She breathed in — one, two, three. She breathed out — one, two, three.

  Thunder crashed, shaking the walls of the house, and she shuddered.

  Ever lifted her hands to the ceiling and trained her eyes on the sky beyond the window. The clouds skimmed the tops of the trees, heavy with rain. It was only a matter of time before the rolling gray mist exploded.

  “From drop to blade, this magic made; from floor to wall, protect this all.” Her voice was high and breathy in the expectant silence of the house.

  Picking up the candle by its heavy base, Ever found her grip on it with her bad left hand. With her right, she grabbed her athame — her black-handled ritual knife with the three-dimensional triangular blade.

  Twenty-five windows. Three doors, she reminded herself and headed downstairs.

  The house always seemed so silent when she was alone. Her mom was somewhere in southeast Asia, doing Goddess-knew-what with God-knew-who, and Nah was still at work. Ever didn’t bemoan the fact that she was often alone — it was just a fact of life, and it had been like that since she was little. But when those solitary nights coincided with some of the worst storms of the season, it did nothing to ease her worries.