by Norah Wilson
She was so pale she looked almost gray, helpless and worn. She’d lost weight. Her skinny-legged jeans were baggy and her black Slayer hoodie hung on her. She looked completely, utterly helpless. Beside her, Maryanne’s original raised both hands, lowered them, and raised them again to let them drop, just because she could. Just because she had to be feeling what Alex was—they looked dead already, there on the ground.
Oh God, surely they weren’t just as good as dead!
“You three will have to get the bodies on the ice,” Smith said. “Position them.”
Alex hadn’t thought that through, but of course they would! Neither man could walk out onto the frozen surface to center the bodies without breaking through. The ice was so thin now, maybe too thin. Alex didn’t know how it would hold their collective weight, even with them lying prone.
And all three of them had to get there. Position themselves over the portrait of Madonna and child they’d made and hope it would hold. Hope it would work.
Alex soared to Brooke’s original first; Maryanne was right there with her. Bryce held her body out.
“No way!” Brooke shouted.
“Brooke, we don’t have time for this! We all have to be on that ice. John and Bryce can’t move us over it without breaking through. We’re losing time; for once, don’t argue! The sooner we get you placed, the sooner we can move Maryanne and me out.”
“Alex is right,” Maryanne shouted. “Now move your black ass! The hunters are coming!”
And if they came upon them too soon, there would be no rest for the casters ever again.
“Fine,” Brooke shouted. Again they wrapped their arms around her body.
“Careful,” Alex breathed. They moved as carefully yet as quickly as they could.
Alex set Brooke’s shoulders down on the ice, and Brooke and Maryanne in turn lowered the rest of her. Her body, black hair splayed out on the ice, lay just at the Madonna’s chest, opposite the child she carried. Brooke’s feet rested just above the thorns, but not touching the tip of a single one.
“After the sluts! This way!”
Shouts.
“Do you smell that?” Maryanne asked. “Is that smoke?”
It was.
Alex cringed at the words and clenched her dark fists, but more, she filled with a fury that was undeniable. A fury she didn’t want to deny! Why should she? She wanted to get the bastards who called her and her sisters those names. Always those names: sluts! whores! And worse. Such hatred, not just because they existed, but because they existed as powerful females. That they should be punished for even being, and that the hunters had the right to be their judge, jury, and executioner.
She found herself wishing now that the old fart Eustace were among them tonight. She’d rattle him to his very bones. She’d shake them all. No, not shake them all. She’d shriek them all!
“They’re taunting you, Alex!” Maryanne was gripping her arm, dragging her back to reality. “Don’t let them. Right now they probably don’t even know we’re here. We have to get back to our bodies. We have to—”
There was a straining, shifting sound.
The ice!
There was so much weight already on the ice—could it hold another body? Two more?
“Hurry!” Brooke cried, finishing Maryanne’s sentence for her with an emphasis of her own. Brooke’s original moaned. It was the loneliest, most frightened sound Alex had ever heard.
Alex knew she was right. Whether the hunters knew it or not, their words of hate were the poison that was really driving Alex’s anger.
This time she couldn’t let it. This time she had to channel it. She let their hatred fortify her. The hunters would not win.
“Maryanne, you’re next,” Alex said strongly. She zoomed to the bodies. Brooke was right behind her. Alex knew Maryanne would have argued, but there was no time for it. Bryce had picked up Maryanne’s original and the three casters grabbed it from his grip. Her hagstone hung down from the leather length around her neck.
She’d better be right about wearing that!
“It’s okay,” she said as if reading Alex’s thoughts. Her original voice and her caster voice merged eerily in the night, like sound had suddenly developed a shadow.
They laid her body down on the ice, her head lower than Brooke’s, beside the baby in the Madonna’s arms.
Then it was Alex’s turn. She hoped there was enough strength left in their casts to complete the task.
By the brilliant light of the moon, John Smith stood on the edge of the pond with Alex’s body in his arms. He extended his reach as far as he could without risking tumbling onto the ice with his burden. The three casters grabbed the limp body and lowered it down on the crystal-heavy ice just as it groaned beneath them. Her head lay close to the shoulder of the mother, her feet, on top of the red stones they’d used for the blood. Jasper…a courage stone.
Oh God, they’d need it.
Alex felt the flood of cold, the dampening of the back of her head and body from the melting ice.
“Bitches!”
That was unmistakably Melissa Kosnick’s shrill and angry voice. The hunters were getting closer.
“I’m going,” John Smith said, suddenly. “I can’t stop them, but maybe I can buy some time.”
All three casters shot to him, but it was Maryanne who grabbed him by the shoulders. She shook her head in a definite no. John had to know the danger he’d be in.
John froze and Maryanne backed off, floating away. “I…I forgot.” Her voice shook. “Forgot how frightening we are to them. How hard that touch is. Even to those who don’t despise us; even to those who understand.” She looked briefly at Bryce, then backed away some more.
“I’ve been fighting for the Hellers all my life,” John said. “I’m not about to stop now.”
“Did you promise my grandmother?” Bryce asked.
How much did he know? How many family secrets?
John Smith nodded. “That too.”
He hurried away from the pond toward the angry voices. He’d buy what moments he could.
“Let’s go,” Alex said. It was time.
The full moon shone down. The three black casters positioned themselves at the bottom of the portrait, by the bloody thorns. This was where Brooke had broken through the ice three days ago, forming those first few cracks that had multiplied to create the image. Alex stood closest to the mouth of the cave. They matched up, each caster standing at the foot of their own original.
“We enter as casters,” Maryanne breathed. “We come out as us again…whole again.”
“Remember to chant,” Alex said. “I want in, I want in, I want in.”
“Right,” Maryanne answered.
But Brooke said nothing, her silence terrifying Alex. Alex grabbed her hand. It was actually a fist that she grabbed, Brooke’s fingers wrapped tightly around something she was still not going to share.
“We all do this,” Alex said. “We’re in this, all or nothing. All three of us. Whatever…whatever happens down there, we share the power. We share the fate. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” Maryanne said. She grabbed Brooke’s other hand. “Brooke?”
And now they both waited for Brooke’s reply.
“We need this pact, Brooke,” Alex said. “This one has to stick.”
Slowly, Brooke nodded. But Alex’s writerly intuition screamed at her not to trust that nod. Brooke Saunders was lying. Alex looked at her friend under the moonlight, looked at the shimmering silver outline of her cast, and just knew it.
They’d had a few moments of silent reprieve while they’d readied themselves, steadied themselves. However John Smith had managed to slow the hunters down, it had worked, but it wasn’t working now. They were coming. So Alex, and then Maryanne, followed Brooke’s dark and empty cast as she slipped down under the ice by the edge of the shimmering pond. Under the ice they turned their casts to line up with their bodies.
Chapter 33
Blue Quartz, We Have A Proble
m
Maryanne
Maryanne’s original stared up at the night sky. The wet and cold seeped through her clothing. The hagstone lay beneath her, pressed between her shoulder blades.
Maryanne’s cast had registered no physical sensation at all as she’d entered the water blessed. Under the ice’s surface, she looked at her sisters. Alex and Brooke lay vertically in the water, Alex was lined up right below her caster self, as was Brooke. Maryanne slid into place beside her. She glanced over at Brooke, who stared up at her cast.
“Look up at the moon,” Brooke said, her muffled caster voice carrying oddly through the water. “Both ways!”
She did—through the eyes of her body above, seeing it all so clearly. Through the eyes of her cast below, seeing the world through the crystal-laden ice, sparkling in the moon’s light. Shining silver. Seeing it all so differently.
The moon’s light illuminated most of the portrait, but not quite. It hadn’t hit the Madonna’s eyes yet.
“It’s ours,” Alex said. “This night, this moon is all ours. We fly with this silver.”
“Now?” Maryanne asked.
It was Brooke who answered. “We wait.”
“Until?”
“Until we know for sure.”
I’m drowning!
Maryanne had been fighting the sensation. She sure as heck wasn’t going to articulate it for the others to know her panic. She couldn’t be drowning. Her cast couldn’t drown and her body was above the ice, but it was her original that felt as if she were going under. Above the ice, she gasped, but it was a hard gasp, as if her lungs were being squeezed.
“Concentrate,” Alex commanded. “Soon this will be over.”
Alex was reading her panic. From the pitch of her voice, she was feeling a little panic herself.
“Just look at her,” a shaky Brooke pleaded. “Look at the mother.”
Maryanne tried to concentrate. She looked up at the moon. She looked up at the glowing ice. In places the ice sparkled like diamonds, more and more as the moon perfectly claimed the portrait.
Maryanne knew it wasn’t just optics. Not just the glass that John Smith had spilled and the wind had spread. She felt herself gravitating to it, pushing up toward the mother and child. It was the same warm tug and tingle she’d felt as she’d run her hands through the bits of broken glass at Harvell House. It had that exact same ‘come here’ feeling, only amplified.
Urgent.
The longer they watched, the more the stones themselves came alive. Light just didn’t shine and glitter around them, it shone down through them now, bit by bit! The red carnelian pulsed. The golden healer quartz vibrated. The angelite beamed. They’d used purple sugilite in parts of the stained glass sky and it practically danced above them.
Almost every stone they’d chosen, puzzled back together, and laid out was working. More and more, it was like being back in time, back before the glass was broken! Back at Harvell House. Back to when they’d tap-tap-tapped on that stained glass, and the Madonna let them out of their pain for a while, always there to let them back into the world again.
But not quite the same.
“The eyes!” Alex mourned. “They’re…they’re wrong!”
Maryanne saw it too. Her heart plummeted. The blue quartz was one of the clearest stones they’d put into the composition, and yet the moon’s silver wasn’t touching the two small pieces. While the rest of the picture came alive, eerily, those stones sat darkly, as if the mother looked down with her own caster-wide eyes, but those eyes were unseeing. The circle of glass that had blown in place around the eyes widened, as if to shrink itself away from these two stones. Not because the stones themselves were wrong—they were wonderful stones!—but because they weren’t the right ones here.
“Hurry when she sees you!” Maryanne cried the line from the chant. “She can’t see us! The very first portal! Child through the mother! Connie’s portal! The glass from Harvell House. We were supposed to go back through here! Through the mother—”
She was choking.
Oh God! The drowning feeling was back. She would drown. Her body was soaking more and more with frigid water, getting heavier and heavier as it rested on the ice and water soaked through her clothing.
“It’s not going to work!” Alex shouted. “She can’t see us!”
The blue quartz shuddered and dropped apologetically one after the other from the face in the picture they’d made. They fell slowly through the dark water, past the casters to the bottom. The eye sockets looked more than empty now, they looked defeated.
Crunch.
“It…it won’t last long before back to hell!” Maryanne recited, her voice rising with panic. Was that what that other stained glass meant? They’d fail and go back to hell? “We’re damned. All three of us, forever! Forever the night!”
Brooke’s voice filled the pond. “No. You’re not. Two have the power. These two. You two.” She opened her hand. “I have the Madonna’s eyes.”
Maryanne gasped, drawing in night air from above.
That was why Brooke had returned to Harvell House that first morning they’d gotten trapped out. She’d retrieved those precious stones before anyone else could. She’d known they were powerful. She had kept them hidden and she’d kept them safe.
But why hadn’t she said something about them before?
Brooke pushed up the few inches necessary to reach the underside of the ice portrait. Then she carefully placed both stones into the eye sockets where the blue quartz had been.
They fit. Perfectly.
In the night above the ice, the girls blinked at the brightness from the powerful moon. In the night below it, they marveled at the glow from the eyes.
Suddenly silver light cut below the ice. But it wasn’t slashing and it wasn’t defused. Brilliant silver light divided through those blue stones, those loving eyes. They cast two perfectly cylindrical portals of light down into the pond. One between Alex and Brooke, one between Brooke and Maryanne.
Just two doors.
And no more.
“Two of us will have to go together in one.” Alex’s cry was punctuated with the sound of cracking ice. The ice was weakening dangerously.
Brooke shouted, “That might not work!”
“What choice do we have?” Maryanne said. “None!”
“Which two of us go together?” Alex asked.
“One has to be me,” Maryanne said, “I was starting to move more before this. Maybe the hagstone is working on my cast as well as my body. It knows I want in and— ”
And then there was no maybe about it.
Maryanne’s cast shot through the first portal. She didn’t just shoot through it; she was forcefully pulled through it, as if an invisible power had brought her through that light. Her cast blasted up and out through that first door of light. Even had she been quick enough to try and stop herself, she couldn’t have. It was that forceful, that commanding.
She cried out in fear and she cried out in pain more intense than she’d ever felt as her cast blasted into her body. She was suddenly airborne. She drew in a deep and gasping lungful of air. She no longer felt as if she was drowning, but agony filled her. Agony filled every fiber of her being as she fused with her body, and then it filled those shocked fibers a little bit more as she fell back down. She hit full-force on the ground beside the pond.
There was a crack. Not in the ice this time, but in her right leg.
It was broken. Definitely and badly.
Maryanne screamed, not in pain but in lament. She was cast back in but Brooke and Alex were still below. Still cast out, and there was only one portal left.
Now she knew why Brooke had kept the stones a secret all this time—so there wouldn’t be time to argue about who cast back, and who stayed behind.
Damn her!
Maryanne found her voice again, and her cry was a screaming, “No!” Where her cast had broken through the ice, over the first portal, it closed to darkness. The ice reformed gra
y and dull. The crystals around it losing their shine. They began dropping down.
Brooke and Alex were still down there!
There was one portal left and very little time!
“She-devils from hell!” The shout came from close by! The hunters, the haters, were coming.
Chapter 34
Ice Breaker Heart Breaker
Alex
Alex heard Maryanne’s painful screech.
Her eyes followed her blast up from the ice, into the air. With her keen caster hearing, she heard the bone-crunching thump as Maryanne landed, not back onto the ice, but beside the pond. Her scream had been like music to Alex’s ears. She’d made it! It hadn’t been an easy landing, but she’d rejoined cast to body. She was out of danger.
Then she heard the angry hunters.
“She-devils from hell!”
She and Brooke were not out of danger!
Panic welled. Oh God, she was choking. No, not choking; she was drowning in panic. Above the ice, her original gasped. Below the frozen surface, she had to fight it now more than ever. Fight the drowning sensation that was pressing all around. Fight the fear. She could not lose control.
“Alex, look up,” Brooke said. Her words were weakening. The heaviness was almost unbearable now. The drowning sensation intense. Alex could feel it, so surely Brooke could too.
She looked up. Ice had reformed around the stones they’d placed so carefully, but even now the dull and emptied crystals were dropping. They dropped so slowly, it was as if they were defying both gravity and buoyancy, or as if they themselves couldn’t believe what was happening. The one portal of light was closed. No, not just closed; it existed no longer. Gone forever.
“That leaves the last one for us, Brooke. We’ll hang on to each other and—”
“No.” Brooke said.
Alex wanted to smack her. “We’ve got to get back before—”
“I can’t go back!”
“You have to!”
“No.”
“Brooke! For God’s sake, why?”
“Because I don’t belong in the world!” she screeched. “I can’t go back to who I was. The perpetual outcast. My real father never wanted me, my mother sure doesn’t want me now. I can’t do it anymore. You think it’s lonely cast out? Oh God, Alex, I can’t go back to being alone in the world. Not anymore.”