The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil

by Heidi Cullinan

  “I love you,” she whispered and launched herself into the Void.

  One moment Madeline was standing beside Jonathan, and the next she was leaping on top of him. She screamed, lit up in blue fire, and stopped, frozen. She was suspended in midair, spread over the length of him, toe to toe, chest to chest. Her hair, long and silken, dangled into his face.

  She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even breathing. Her eyes were open, pupils fixed. Her mouth was agape, her expression frozen in horror and pain.

  The room was strangely quiet, echoing and heavy around them. There was a powerful spell hanging in the room, but it was fading.

  And Madeline was dead.

  Jonathan stared up at the body hovering inches from his face. He tried to deny it. He tried to hope, telling himself this might be a spell, that he might be wrong, that this might, somehow, not be the moment he had been running from for ten years. But he could not hope because he knew death. He knew what a body looked like and what it felt like when it was nothing more than a shell. He had seen it many, many times. He had made many of these shells. And he knew with absolutely certainty he was looking at one of them now.

  He reached up and touched her face.

  Gone. Gone. She was gone.

  He made a strangled, desperate sound in the back of his throat and lifted his other hand to her face—so cold, so cold it burned.

  Gone. She was gone. Madeline Elliott was dead.

  Jonathan stroked her cheek again. He tipped her face gently to his and looked deep into her fixed, unseeing eyes. Then he felt the demon stirring inside him, felt it reaching and growing, and he almost laughed.

  Well. He had failed her again. But she, even in death, had managed to save him. Because as he felt the demon’s claws reaching up inside of him, he felt something shift and break, as if a bubble had surrounded him but now was gone. Whatever she had done, whatever this spell she had cast had been meant to do, it had resulted in giving him exactly what he had wanted.

  The demon drove its talon into Jonathan’s heart, and he knew with certainty that when it withdrew, he would die. At last.

  The pain was sharper than he had thought it would be, but Jonathan didn’t mind. Inside his body, the demon grew heavy, then burst open. It growled, and it clawed. Jonathan barely noticed, too caught up in Madeline. He smiled into her unseeing eyes, unable to stop touching her face.

  “I love you too,” he said and leaned up to place a soft, sweet kiss against her lips. Then he kissed her again. And again. And again.

  He lost himself in the now warm touch of her lips, the smooth curve of her face, living not in his body of pain, but in this sad, strange space of her death. The demon clawed once more, raking him. Jonathan ignored it and held on to Madeline. Soon it would take him into hell, into the dark prison of traitorous Perrys, and he would never see her again, but it did not have him yet, and so he lingered with her. The demon tugged at him, stretching him as far as he could be stretched, shouting, screaming, scolding in some horribly wretched tongue.

  Only at the end, when he had no choice, did Jonathan let go.

  Take me. I cannot be with her, and I have failed her, failed everything. Take me to my death and end this at last.

  He drew a deep breath, his last, and let go. But to his surprise, he didn’t let go of Madeline. He let go of his body.

  Chapter Six

  do

  cup

  The cup is associated with water, because water cannot properly exist

  without a container.

  But water is not always happy to be contained.

  Jonathan felt the snap, a slap against his back, except as soon as he thought that, he realized he didn’t have a back. Confused, he held on as he felt himself—what self? what?—rushing, streaming, screaming through the black. He shuddered. Cold. Goddess save him, it was so cold. He opened his eyes, or the things that were there, whatever they were, in the place where eyes would be. She was here—blue, made of light and shimmering in an unseen sun, but she was here. Madeline, in his arms.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but water rushed in, making him choke. She clutched at him.

  “How did you come here?”

  She didn’t open her mouth, but he heard the words inside his head. But I have no head. He felt panic, felt a pull, felt her slipping from his arms—

  She bore him up, holding him steady. “Stop thinking. Don’t think of your body. This is a spirit body. It has what you wish it to have. But if you panic, it will pull you back.” Her control slipped a little, and her fingers tightened against him. “Please don’t go.”

  That settled him a great deal, and he pushed the panic fully away. She was here. She wasn’t dead, or if she was, so was he. “I won’t go,” he tried to say, but he got water again.

  She pressed cold fingers against his lips. They made his body buzz with an electric hum. “Not your mouth. Just think at me. Don’t try so hard. You’re screaming. Just…think.”

  Jonathan nodded, then tried too hard. He gasped, got more water, and fell against her. “Goddess damn it,” he thought and realized he’d just done it.

  She laughed and kissed his hair. Or whatever was there in place of it.

  “How did you come here?” She stroked him gently. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t know how—I just—”He lifted his head and looked her in the eye, remembering. He remembered her death and the pain and his sorrow. “I kissed you.”

  She smiled. It looked odd in shimmer blue, but it was still her smile. He smiled back and wondered briefly if he was blue too, but something told him not to try to look.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “What happened?”

  She looked up and around at the great rushing vastness of black nothing. “I don’t know.” She looked grim. “The daemon was there in the circle. Mine this time. It wanted me to kill you so it could consume you. I refused, and I cast a spell to bind your demon. But I have no guides, so I cannot ground. So I leaped at it. It was a stupid thing to do.” She looked sadly at him. “Especially since it seems to have killed you anyway.”

  Something about that didn’t quite fit, but Jonathan had fixated more deeply on a different point. His head felt strange and disjointed—he was vaguely aware that he should be rejoicing and embracing her, but his emotions felt like wind here: difficult to see and impossible to grasp. Facts were so much easier. And so many of them made no sense.

  “What do you mean, you have no guides?” he asked her. “I thought they came when you took your vows to be an Apprentice.”

  “I did have them—until today.” She shook her blue head in despair. “I defied them to come and try to save you. They told me I wasn’t strong enough, and they were right.”

  “You seemed to do well enough to me,” he said. He glanced around at the sucking black of space around them. “Outside of this, I suppose.” He drew her closer to him. “What happens now?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “This is the Void. The true Void, beyond the reach even of the witches. There is nothing here, and there is no way out.”

  Jonathan felt her shimmering spirit body in his arms, felt her heart center pressed against his. “We found a way in. Therefore there must also be a way out.”

  She could look exasperated even in a spirit body, it turned out. “I already told you, we can’t. I did not ground when I came here. I only leaped.”

  “How do you ground?” he dogged her. “What does that mean?”

  She gestured to the black. “When I cast, I leave my body. For small spells, it’s not such a problem, but for large ones, I need spirit anchors—guides—to pull me back. They guide me back to my body. But I have no life cord, Jonathan. I severed it when I left. There was no one to guard it for me.”

  Jonathan remembered her earlier warning, how he had panicked and almost slipped away. But where, he wondered now, would he have slipped to? If this was the Void, where did one fall to in the Void? He tried to remember the feeling. He hadn’t been about to
disintegrate; he’d been being pulled back to something. He could feel the pull even now, he thought, like wreckage dragging on a ship. He frowned.

  “Madeline, I’m fairly certain I can still feel my body,” he said.

  She looked startled, then hopeful. Then disappointed again. “But I can’t ground to you.”

  “Why not?” he demanded. “If I can see my body, and you can see my spirit, why can’t you follow me back to your own?”

  “It isn’t like following string. A guide almost…possesses me.” She looked momentarily abashed. “They enter me, ‘hooking’ me, pulling me back, rushing into my body, then releasing my spirit when it is back in my body. From the moment they claim me until they release me, I am literally one with them.”

  It all sounded so perfectly ethereal and spiritual and very witchy, and yet the description was supremely irritating to Jonathan. “It sounds like sex.”

  Her face shimmered and she looked demure. “It is much like intercourse, I suppose.”

  It was exactly like it, from the look of her. It made him angry, irrationally so. He’d left her thinking she would marry, which would have meant sex with someone, so why was he so jealous of some misty, ethereal spirit who was solely interested in shepherding and didn’t have a body? It did bother him, though. It sounded fantastically intimate.

  Something fantastically intimate that he had never allowed himself to enjoy with her.

  “I want to do it, then.” He imagined he was blushing now, feeling like a bumbling boy of fourteen telling his sweetheart he wanted to take off his pants and show her his penis. He didn’t care. “If I’m a spirit now, why can’t I do it?”

  “But you can’t place me in my body! They enter me, Jonathan. How can you enter me and then go back to yourself? We could, maybe, put me inside of you, but then how would you get me out again—Ah.”

  She blushed so hard that for a moment she seemed to vanish entirely.

  Jonathan wanted to scream. It had to be this, didn’t it? The one thing he couldn’t give her. “Too broken.” It made him angry, made him feel hot with rage, even though he was still so, so cold.

  She turned to him, taking his face in her hands. “We will try. We will try your idea—and if it doesn’t work, you’ll let go.”

  “I can’t,” he said, hating this, hating himself, hating his father all over again. “The wound my father gave me made me impotent, Madeline. I can’t—well, for a while I could, but now—”He shut his eyes, the feeling of darkness in darkness very strange, but at least he didn’t have to see the look on her face. “I’m sorry.”

  She remained silent for long moments that didn’t need a Void to make them feel like years, and Jonathan used that time to alternate between hating himself and hating his father and the whole Whitby/Perry insanity that had led him to this indignity. But then he felt her kiss against his eyebrow, and it made his spirit flutter.

  “Are you…damaged, or is it the pain? Are you incapable, or—”

  “Just pain,” he said, cutting her off. Hearing her speak of it was far worse than admitting it himself. “I can, if pressed, but I have to be fantastically drunk and randy as a goat. It’s the tightening. It hurts too much—”

  She laughed, the sound so happy and light that it made him open his eyes in time to see her kiss him firmly on the mouth. “Then we can do it, Jonathan. If you ground me, if you just hold tight to me, I can push the pain outside of you.”

  Hope and something far more primal stirred in his spirit. “But won’t that distract you?”

  She shook her head. “No. I do it every day.” She touched his head. “I find the ‘wire’ in your mind telling it that there is pain, and I turn it off. It’s very simple. Even some novices can do it.”

  The bumbling, fourteen-year-old feeling was growing. “What do we do? What should I do?”

  He took her in his arms, felt her shimmer against him. He felt himself stirring—it was as if his entire “body” were an erection. And without pain. The feeling was heady, and it made him bold. He slid his hand down her back, pressing her hard against him. He couldn’t feel his penis, exactly, but it didn’t seem to matter. Simply pressing her spirit against his own seemed to be enough.

  It was affecting her too. She shifted against him, glowing now as she wrapped her legs around his waist and pressed her chest hard against his own. No breasts—and yet no contact had ever been more erotic.

  “We must align our life cords.” She nuzzled his nose, then reached behind him, stroking the length of his spine. “From the sex, to the stomach, to the heart, the throat, the eyes, the crown. Both in a line. Then enter me, and I will enter you.”

  Jonathan shifted closer, pressing his forehead to hers as their lips and noses nuzzled. “And you did this with your guides?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But not quite like this. Somehow this feels very, very different.”

  “Good,” he thought and took her lips again.

  It was the same rush as before, except louder and harder. He entered her, the act like sexual congress and yet not at all—and then with a strange sucking feeling, he felt her slide inside him. It was like being invaded, impaled, and he gasped, surprised, never having felt quite this before, and the shock made him open his eyes.

  His real eyes. He was back in the tower room and back in his body.

  The pain hit him like a slab, particularly in his groin. But before he could even whimper, he felt it go again, shoved aside, exploded—and then he felt only her, a tingling, beautiful fire that ran the length of him.

  His cock was bulging, ramrod straight and as hard and sure as iron.

  He groaned in pleasure more exquisite than any he had ever dreamed of. Ten years he had carried that pain, and with one touch, it was gone, gone, gone. He shuddered as he felt that shimmering force that was Madeline lift. A thread remained between them, running the length of him, escaping like a mist from his fantastically erect penis. He opened his eyes and watched her appear ghostlike before him, so that it was as if she were doubled: her still, cold, dead body, and her blue, shining spirit, united as one.

  Almost.

  Her spirit hands reached down and stroked his face. “You’ll need to enter me. If you were a guide, you would crawl inside the top of my head and race down. We’ll need to be more traditional.”

  He wanted to be flip and lighten the mood, but he couldn’t. Goddess save him, but he wanted her so badly it was an ache. Jonathan touched her faces: his hand passed through the shimmering one to stroke the cold one. “Do you want me to undress you?”

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  Her spirit body faded, but it hadn’t left. He saw the shimmers reappear over her shoulder; then they appeared again and moved like disembodied hands, drawing her shift from her skin, rolling it up her body, pulling it over her head before flinging it away. And then she was naked. Her hair hung in dark threads over her shoulders.

  He blinked and she smiled. She reached down, her spirit guiding her body, and he felt her body’s cold hand press against his seeping wound. The cold did not last, and he hissed, not so much in pain as pressure, as he felt the wound closing. The thing inside it shifted, angry, but reduced as she continued to touch him there, the demon growing smaller and smaller until it seemed just a small, angry ball lodged impotently once more against the side of his leg. Then she murmured soft words, and he felt the ball leave him as well, sliding like butter through his skin and into her hand. He cried out as it left him, not in pain but relief.

  Ten years. He’d carried it for ten years, and it had tried in so many ways to kill him. Now it was a small blood-red stone in the center of her spirit hand.

  Healed. She’d healed him—just like that.

  “How?” he rasped, his voice shaking. The rest of him was too.

  She shook her head, looking mystified by the stone. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I don’t know how I did it.” She turned the stone over in her transparent blue hand, studying it. “I can’t reduce it f
urther, either. This is the Perry demon—daemon once more—and it is bound by the spell. I can only touch it at all because I am spirit alone, not flesh. But it must be contained.” She looked around, searching, then nodded at the stand beside his head. “The wooden cup there. Please give it to me.”

  He handed it to her. “Ugly thing.”

  She smiled, then dropped the stone inside. A small red cloud flared. She turned it upside down, then showed it to him. The cup was empty.

  “Now it’s a prison,” she said. “I wonder how it got out of its talisman in the first place.”

  “I think my father put it in himself,” Jonathan said a little gruffly. “I don’t know why. Probably because he was mad.”

  “And then it went into you. But it didn’t drive you mad, and it didn’t kill you. It should have done one or the other or both, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. Why didn’t it work? What kept it at bay? What kept you alive is what kept this out. But what? How—”She stopped, arrested, then slowly reached down and touched the leather cord around his neck, and then the small stone at the end.

  He closed his hand around it self-consciously. “You gave it to me. Remember? At the tree? You told me it would keep me safe.” He smiled, abashed. “I never took it off. Not once. Even the monks left it on, actually.”

  She was starting to shimmer again, and in an alarming way. She was staring at the stone, and she looked sick. “I did this. I did this to you.”

  He lifted the stone on its string and stared at it, incredulous. “But it’s just a stone! Charmed, yes—”

  “That was my charm, Jonathan. My first one. The Morgan beat me terribly for giving it away. She said whatever I had wished over it would come true, and when she found out what I had wished, she tried to destroy it and make me do it again, but I gave it away before she could. The only reason she let the matter rest was I told her it didn’t work, because I thought it hadn’t. If I had thought it would do this—”