Julian rolled his eyes. “Spare me from bad B movies. But for lack of a better definition we’ll go with that.”
Looking around at the suddenly ominous-seeming candles and paraphernalia, Lisa couldn’t prevent her snarky side from coming to the forefront. Her eyes locked on the clear crystal ball. She reached out and tapped the surface. “So is someone’s disembodied head gonna appear in there and intone great and ancient wisdom for us?”
A frown flickered across Julian’s face. “You know, you don’t have to be so snippy.”
Lisa crossed her arms beneath her blanket and glared up at him. “After my day I can be whatever the hell I want to be.”
Tim laughed as he flopped into his chair. “She’s got ya there.”
Julian gave a long-suffering sigh, eyes rolling. “You know this isn’t easy for me to do with someone else in the room. You’re not making it any easier.”
“Just get on with the magic show, Houdini,” Lisa teased, crossing her arms and legs. “Make a believer out of me.”
Julian opened his mouth but snapped it closed as he thought better of whatever he’d been about to say. He turned to the shelves and started pulling out three short, chunky white candles and multiple sticks of incense. Lisa just shook her head. Stereotypical after all. She’d hoped for a little originality, especially since this was Julian.
“Do we join hands and start chanting odes to Hecate now? Or maybe we strip down and dance naked for a while. I wouldn’t be against that.”
“Damn, Julian,” Tim snickered, rocking his chair on its back legs with an irritating squeak. “She’s worse than I was. Least I acted like I believed you. She’s not even going to pretend you’re not crazy.”
Julian ignored their banter, concentrating on setting up whatever show he had in store for her. He lit the incense, leaving it in a dish on the bookshelves. He then turned to make a perfect triangle around the crystal ball with the candles. When everything was placed to his satisfaction he sat down and stared into the orb.
Minutes passed in silence. Lisa yawned and wiggled in her hard seat. Sharp needles tingled through her butt as her circulation came back. “Isn’t the table gonna levitate or the spirits start rapping? I mean, this isn’t very impressive. Not even any chanting or flickering lights. If you wanted to bore me into a coma you coulda done it while I was on the couch. More comfortable there.”
“Why didn’t you tell us what you saw in the warehouse?” Julian asked.
“I told you, two crazies having an orgy before they killed me,” Lisa replied, ignoring Julian’s blank, entranced expression. The very thought of the warehouse had her pulling her blanket tighter. “What more do you need to know?”
“What about the ritual?” Julian continued asking, voice locked in monotone and eyes glued to the crystal and sights no one else could see. “The blood pooling around the summoning marks, being absorbed by them? The trembling earth and the opening of the portal?”
Lisa sat up straighter, gripping the edges of her blanket. The hair at the back of her neck prickled and her stomach turned cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You saw the opening, the portal,” he continued in a monotone, never looking up from the crystal. “You saw the hand of the master, their Demon Lord, clawing his way into the mortal world through a breach in reality. You caught a glimpse of what the future holds for this entire city.”
Shaking her head, Lisa scooted her chair back, her legs too weak for her to stand. “I had a hallucination. I saw a drug-induced illusion.”
Finally Julian looked up at her, refusing to allow her denial. “The past is clear to me. If that’s true, how do I know about it, details happening in your mind that you never told anyone else? How could I know if it wasn’t real? If my powers aren’t real?”
The room wavered in front of Lisa’s eyes. Her skin grew clammy and her stomach rolled. The electric taste of utter fear coated her tongue. How could he know? It hadn’t been real and she hadn’t said anything. So how?
But his explanation was a lot weirder than she could’ve imagined.
“We’ve known you for centuries, millennia,” he began, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. “We’ve loved you throughout every one of our lifetimes. More often than not you don’t believe us when we tell you this. But we do love you and we want nothing more in this life or any other than to protect you. What you saw was real. It’s coming, soon. We have to stop it. Together.”
Lisa blinked, trying to take in his words. Past lives? Demons real? Saving the world, together? Things were sounding more and more like a bad B movie with every passing moment. “We have to stop it? If what you’re saying is true, and I’m not saying that it is, how could we stop it? You’re talking ultimate evil. Armageddon. Revelations-type stuff. Horror movie shit. Kinda beyond the scope of a small business owner or chef. Am I supposed to save the world by giving the evil overlord salmonella?”
Tim snickered. Julian glared at him. Tim raised his hands above his head. “What? My first question was whether you expected me to fuck Satan to death. I was closer to the truth than her but just as sarcastic.”
“Cursed to an eternity spent with you two,” Julian grumbled as he tried to concentrate on the crystal again. “That was my punishment for before.”
“Before?” Lisa asked, letting his statements settle for a moment.
“Atlantis,” Tim replied.
“You’re responsible for the fall of Atlantis?” This was just too much, beyond any semblance of reality. Her brain teetered on the edge of breakdown. “You expect me to believe you’re responsible for the fall of the mythic island city?”
“Why not?” Julian responded matter-of-factly.
And how do I respond to that, beyond the obvious? “I don’t know. Because this whole thing sounds full of shit?”
Finally the smart-ass attitude struck a chord with Julian. His face grew red and that little muscle beside his right eye began to tic. “What do you want to know? What can I tell you to convince you?” he growled more than asked. “I know what you saw, what you didn’t tell us but that isn’t enough? Do you want me to tell you about your father, how he left and your mother died? Should I talk about the asshole you married, how he only hit you once then you left him to start over without any help? You didn’t put that in your divorce papers, didn’t want other people knowing you were weak enough to stick with someone capable of physically hurting you. Janice probably knows or guesses but I doubt you told anyone else, if you told her.”
“How?” Lisa gasped and stood, heart bleeding with embarrassment coupled with a strange sense of betrayal. Her eyes felt suspiciously wet and she couldn’t seem to hold her blanket around her tightly enough. “You investigated me? You found that out about me?”
Julian shook his head, his fierce expression fading into remorse in the face of her pain. “While I appreciate the vote of confidence, I may be good but I’m not that good. I can’t know what you never told anyone. Not without having some other way to find the information. I have second sight. I am a Visionary, one of a Three destined to protect the mortal world.”
Lisa shivered but stood her ground. “And who’s he,” she asked, gesturing at the Tim with his pity-filled expression, “demon bait?”
“Projective empath,” Tim answered, chest puffing as he deflected a little of her anger and hurt away from Julian to include him. “The Empath is the power behind the throne.”
“Huh?”
Tim laced his fingers behind his head, stretching his pecs beneath his well-loved cotton t-shirt. The picture of calm and cool. Too bad the bizarre reality behind his words ruined the effect. “If we do the ritual to keep these bastards where they belong we use my power to get the party started.”
“And where do I fit in?” Lisa asked, edging away from the men. “No freakish powers here to speak of, unless the power to peel a potato in twenty seconds or less comes up.”
“You’re the Catalyst, the controlling factor,
” Julian replied, taking control of the conversation again. Lisa looked at Tim for a reaction but he only grinned and shrugged, nodding to his partner. Julian ignored the exchange and continued his explanation. “Without you to channel and magnify Tim’s powers through the ritual I perform we aren’t strong enough to stop them.”
“This is impossible,” Lisa whispered, taking another step back from the table.
Julian wouldn’t let her retreat into denial, wouldn’t allow her to leave without hearing everything he had to say. “You saw it. Deny it all you want but it won’t change the truth. It was real no matter what you want to believe. We’re just damned lucky it was just his arm and the portal hasn’t opened enough to let him through completely yet.”
A loud bang echoed through the room, causing Lisa to jump. Tim shoved out of the chair he’d just dropped back to all four legs. For once his happy-go-lucky expression was completely missing. “She doesn’t believe you, Julian. But maybe she’ll believe me.”
He stepped forward, golden face dark, his light blue eyes snapping with his thundering displeasure. For the first time ever Tim frightened her. Julian seemed the strength of the couple but at that moment something in Tim’s stern face sent chills racing throughout her body.
“I won’t hurt you,” he muttered as she retreated with each step he took. “But if you won’t believe what we say, you’ll believe what I feel.”
With that his hands shot forward. He gripped her face with firm palms and closed his eyes. At first all Lisa felt was his warmth. Strong manicured fingers that played her body like a fine instrument. She expected the shot of lust she always got when he touched her. And fire did lash her body, but not lust alone.
Love and worry. Protectiveness and caring. Strange foreign sensations battered her, filling her with a glowing heat.
She whimpered under his touch, tried to wrench her head free. “No, you won’t deny us, not in this,” he snarled, hands tightening as more sensations swirled around them, bombarding her. “You see the truth. You feel the truth.”
He pulled her closer, forcing her lips against his. Not angrily or brutally. A butterfly’s caress. A gentle meeting of the mouths that melted her heart, shook her soul. “I love you. We love you. Now. Then. Forever. Eternally. Nothing you do or did will ever change our feelings. Even if you run from us we’ll still be here waiting for you. You’ll never find abandonment here with us. Only love, support and commitment. You mean everything to us.”
Lisa whimpered, closing her eyes. But she couldn’t deny this, couldn’t block out the emotions. His love. And through him she felt the echoes of Julian’s.
But could she trust it? Did it matter? An apocalypse in the balance. Destruction on a massive scale. Could she just go with the flow this one time? Or would more than her heart break when they left her?
Would they shatter her soul?
“Can you at least trust us enough to give us a chance? It’s all we ask, a chance. One more night with the two of us and you’ll know the truth, one way or another,” Tim said as Julian stepped to her back.
She closed her eyes as their dual warmth and strength surrounded her. A fair chance. One last night of passion.
Even in the face of this insanity, could a sane woman reject such an offer?
“So we have sex and the world is saved?” she asked, needing to be absolutely certain about what she was agreeing to. “Spell it out for me. I’m not entering into some sort of eternal pact in your religion? Or some legal mess I’ll be fighting for the rest of my life?”
“If we follow the proper rituals and you give yourself over to us the world is saved. Anything after that is up to you,” Julian answered.
I can’t believe I’m considering this. “And you’ll drop all this crazy talk if nothing happens?”
Julian looked almost ill at the thought. “Oh, something will happen, believe me.”
“But you’ll drop it if nothing happens?” she demanded. If she did this, against all her better judgment, she better get something out of it, if only a sense of closure.
It was Tim who answered, his hands cupping her shoulders, squeezing and releasing. “We’ll do whatever you want for as long as you want if you just trust us for this one night.”
She looked into Tim’s earnest eyes. So much raw emotion simmering below the surface. Aching waves rippled from that deep well. It was easy to believe he was an empath capable of filling others with his feelings.
If it was true, what would it be like to make love to him while he used those powers, to feel him inside her?
“One night,” she heard herself saying as her common sense screamed bloody murder in the back of her mind. But a night with these two men was worth the pain of the morning after. “I promise one night. Nothing more. I can leave the moment it’s over, no questions and no pressure.”
“If that’s what you want, you have our word,” Julian swore with no little anguish in his voice.
Lisa bit her lip but kept her eyes steady. “So what do we have to do?”
“I think it’s time for you to see our bedroom.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mograith stared down at his still-throbbing arm. He’d barely managed to yank it out as the rip moved through space. His minions hadn’t been able to hold it in place and give chase to the Catalyst at the same time. Fucking bitch. Idiots. Bastards. No one hurt him. No one. When he got his claws on that human cunt he’d make her wish his minions had shoved her through the tear and let him have her then and there.
Cradling his aching arm, he spat onto the chunks of meat at his feet. Failure was unacceptable. How dare those fools think that they could return here and beg his forgiveness? He had no forgiveness. Demon lords were not known for their kind and generous manners. But they’d had nowhere else to go. The imps couldn’t stay in the mortal realm indefinitely. And no other demon lord in any other level of hell would’ve accepted such miserable failures into their numbers. They wanted to absorb strength, not give sanctuary to weakness.
Now they’d never again disappoint him.
Not that her escape made much difference. He’d still have her, soon enough. Already the tear grew larger with each passing moment. Mere hours stood between him and utter conquest.
Mograith turned to look back at the horde gathering behind him, a dark wave of destruction stretching out to the horizon. Teeth and claws glistened in the cold lights. Leathery wings cracked in the breeze. Clawed feet stomped and scratched at the ice. Snarls and growls, punctuated by the occasional howl, filled the air with demonic fury. Brimstone, dried blood, musk and darker scents filled the air.
His army waited for the chance to create havoc and chaos. Soon the mortal world would fall once more beneath his heels. Terror and anguish would feed his masses, bringing them strength, maybe enough to break into another hell and extend his realm.
Opportunity waited. Opportunity for power. Opportunity for revenge.
The tear need only extend mere inches and it would become a full portal, the opening large enough to expand and control from this side. First he would cross, with his horde close behind.
Then he’d rip the Three apart, put them back together and start on the real fun.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At first, compared to the rest of the house, the bedroom seemed stark. No theme and no artwork filled the corners. There were no splashes of quirky personality. One sturdy utilitarian dresser stood against the wall. Strategically placed blue rugs broke the bare hardwood floor. But then there was the bed.
The bed made the room.
The thing was massive, what Janice would call orgy-sized. It could comfortably fit six, much less three. And it was a perfect square with no headboard or footboard. The only thing differentiating the top from any other side was the line of plush pillows. And at each corner, towering above the rest, were solid squared posts made from a dark wood.
All in all this room stood for only two things—a good night’s sleep or a spectacular evening of sex.
Lisa leaned back on the bed, stomach clenched as her lovers took their places to either side of her. One golden and giving as a Greek god. One dark and brooding as a Celtic warrior. Watching them move closer through the dim light sent waves of desire crashing through her, despite everything else. Their spicy masculine scent, the smell of male desire, enveloped her, heating her blood.
The bed shifted beneath her as Tim sat down, crooning. “Don’t worry so much. This is about pleasure, nothing bad. Making a connection with other human beings, people you care for. What’s to worry about?”
“I don’t know. According to you the fate of the world comes to mind.” She cringed at her own halfhearted nervous laugh following her words. “I mean, talk about performance anxiety.”
Magic of Three Page 21