by C. E. Murphy
“I know.” I looked down at her, searching for words. “Look, you ever notice how in movies or TV the one guy who gets the phenomenal cosmic power is the one guy who doesn’t want it? Maybe the universe sets itself up that way as a fail-safe. Maybe that’s why I ended up with all this power, instead of somebody who’d been pursuing it her whole life.”
Faye’s mouth tightened into a thin line. Great, I’d done it again. “Faye, I wasn’t trying to be insulting—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “You’re a part of the coven now. We’ll help guide you into your powers, and when Virissong has returned to this world you’ll see that it’s better the way that we’re trying to make it. Come on. We’re going to be late.” She turned and stalked off again, leaving me with nothing to do but walk away or follow.
I followed, feeling oddly abandoned. Tromping around parks preparing for coven meetings wasn’t my usual evening routine, and after the past few days I felt distanced from what I considered my real life. I wanted to hang out with Gary and maybe go see a movie, or go drink beer with some of the guys from the shop. Normal things, which I didn’t seem to have time for. Failing that, it would be nice to fit in with the coven in some fashion, but here I was, studying the angry swing of Faye’s hair as she marched ahead of me. I couldn’t imagine asking for a shaman’s gifts, or wanting the responsibility of trying to save the world, whereas the coven seemed very into that idea. Cars. I was happy being responsible for the state of someone’s vehicle. Their spirits or souls—that was a calling I wasn’t at all happy with.
Then again, my power animals hadn’t charged me with being comfortable with what I was and what I could do, only to accept, honor, and study. Curiously, that made me feel better.
“Joanne, Faye. There you are.” Marcia’s voice interrupted my train of thought and I blinked. We stood in a copse of trees, blocks of sunlight sliding through the trunks in golden, dust-littered chunks. The coven, looking mobbish and happy, surrounded me, and I hadn’t even noticed approaching them. Garth and Sam were building an entirely illegal fire.
“Nice trick,” I said. “How do you do that, the hiding in plain sight thing?”
“It’s a matter of expectation. I’m surprised you didn’t see us.” Marcia sounded ever so slightly accusing. I shrugged.
“I was thinking about something else. Aren’t we going to get in trouble for that fire?”
“No one will notice,” she promised me.
Another matter of expectation, I presumed. My own personal expectation was that somebody out of her sphere of influence would see smoke rising from the park grounds and call the cops, but I didn’t say that out loud. I sat down a few feet away, watching the fire build. “So I thought this was all going down on Tuesday.”
“Tuesday’s the grand finale.” Garth straightened out of his crouch, dusting his palms against his jean shorts.
“Okay. Tonight’s spirit, Tuesday’s the grand finale. What’s tomorrow?” At least I could be better prepared once.
“Tomorrow we give the spirits body.”
I must’ve looked as bewildered as I felt, because another coven member—a girl whose name I thought was Roxie—said, “So they can walk the earth as they did when the world was young.”
“We can do that without a full coven?” I asked cautiously. Around me, guarded looks were exchanged.
“We think so,” Marcia finally said. “It would be better with the thirteenth, but with you—”
What was I, the Energizer Bunny? “I’ll try,” I said. I felt like I had to. I wanted to do what I could to end the heat wave. Smiles met my words, and I ducked my head to hide a grimace. I hadn’t meant to sign on for changing the face of the earth, spiritually or otherwise. “Did it,” I started, then cut myself off as curious faces turned to me. “Never mind.”
“Did it what?” Roxie, if that was her name, had a headful of tight curls and a cant to her stance that invited openness.
“Did it ever occur to any of you that there might be a reason the spirits don’t walk the earth anymore?” I sighed. “Maybe a good reason?”
Blank expressions met my words. I nodded. “That’s what I thought. Just thought I’d bring it up. Never mind. Carry on.”
“We turned our back on the spirits a long time ago,” Marcia said. “They moved away, to wait for us to recognize our need for them. Now that we have, we’ll share that knowledge with the rest of the world, and balance will be restored.” She sounded utterly confident.
“And you don’t think eleven people making a decision for six billion others might be a little…arrogant?” Man. My mouth just wouldn’t shut up.
“Of course it is.” Marcia smiled, and Faye’s eyebrows drew down into a scowl. “If we’re truly arrogant and this is truly not the correct path, I believe that the Goddess will not allow us to succeed.”
“And if she does, it’s okay?”
Marcia nodded. The Elder stepped up beside her, as confident in his bearing as Marcia was in her words. “I admire your caution, Joanne. It shows wisdom.”
I grinned a bit. “A trait not normally seen in the young?”
He flashed me a smile in return, without nodding. For an unexpected moment, my vision deepened, setting aside the mundane world for the spirit world the coven was so eager to call up. The Elder blazed with power, a V-8 engine stuffed into a body designed for a V-6 at best. He was connected to the earth in an almost literal fashion, glowing lines of strength flowing from his spine, from his hands and feet, and burying themselves in the ground. When he stepped away from Marcia, it was with a profound sense of centeredness, as if nothing could knock him from his feet unless he permitted it to. The earth itself held him in its grasp, sure as the earth was in the sun’s thrall. Seen this way, he was gorgeous, serene colors of confidence connecting him to the world.
At least, I hoped they were serene colors of confidence. My vision clung to the inverted, and his power lines were weirdly spiked, black centers with glowing outsides that filtered from one shade to another. He felt honest and true, but my eyes couldn’t prove it.
Faye had real power as well, glowing a horrible lime-green against the black circle of the setting sun. I thought it might be sunlight yellow against the genuine gold of the sunset, if my vision’d been behaving. Garth, to my surprise, spiked with power, too, his a murky brown that I thought might really be green. My head was beginning to pound, but I didn’t dare blink as I looked from one coven member to another.
The others were duller, even the Father, their magic buoyed by their faith in the Goddess more than their own ability to command power. They were, I thought, what the strength of the coven needed: support. I blinked away from them toward Marcia, wanting a read on the final living member of the six named positions in the coven. She stepped into a shaft of sunlight as I looked her way, and inverted color inverted again, flaring from black into gold. Tears sprang to my eyes from the brilliance. By the time I’d blinked them away again, I’d lost the sight, and Marcia was smiling down at me. “Do you think you’re ready, Joanne?”
I wasn’t ready at all, but I climbed to my feet. “Yeah. Yeah, all right, let’s do this thing.”
Chapter Eighteen
I had no idea why the cops weren’t coming down on us like a load of bricks. The flames, pushed to a bonfire, sent heat pouring over us. Everyone but me sang in a language I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure it was a real language, but after a few minutes of listening to the high, sweet tones, it didn’t matter. It was like Gregorian chants wrapped around wind chimes. Their voices got under my skin, lifting goose bumps. Faye’s soprano skirled up, pure enough to tangle with thin blue wood smoke, and dropped away again, leaving the air sharper and harder to breathe, like someone had brought a winter chill into the smoky summer air. Garth’s tenor matched her for a few notes, then was overrun by the Elder’s deep baritone.
Whistling, I thought, had nothing on this performance. I could feel what they were doing, all the way into my bones. Their sin
ging had the same power as the drum, breaking down thought into the pure joy of sound. And, like the drum, it was meant to dilute the walls between the worlds, allowing the merely mortal to pass into the Upper and Lower Worlds. It made me gasp for air and grin at the fire while I struggled not to dance for the sheer delight of being alive. I leaned into the music, catching vowel sounds and carrying them up into the smoke, driven to participate without wanting to disrupt.
The six of us began by holding hands. We women had the symbols of the moon painted on our palms with sticky red that flared black in my wretched vision. The men stood between us, their own symbols—sword, scythe, skull—painted on their palms. When we joined hands, power spasmed through us, an electrical connection that lingered even after we stepped back from the fire. The other coven members joined us one at a time, taking up the empty spaces between our shoulders. Each new addition changed the power flow, a brisk shock that went through my body and pooled in unexpected places. I’d never thought about magic making a girl horny. Suddenly the reputed Wiccan practice of performing witchcraft “skyclad” sounded pretty entertaining.
Too bad, the irreverent and sane part of my mind said, that the garden Gary isn’t around.
It was too bad Gary wasn’t here, period. He would’ve loved the pageantry. I grinned, bumping my shoulders against the people next to me. I’d have to enjoy it for him, and tell him about it in the morning.
We made a tight circle around the fire. Ring around the rosy, I sang to myself, not wanting to interrupt the music the others still made. My feet had begun a bright, excited dance entirely of their own volition, and the coven as a whole circled the fire, crushing half steps closer to the flame.
Power built in its heart, a core of white expanding. I wanted to kneel down and touch it, but the under-the-skin ache of sunburn stopped me. My own powers, meant for healing or not, wouldn’t stop me from developing some lovely third-degree burns if I stuck my hand into a bonfire.
I was almost dancing in the fire now as it was, singing the few bright sounds I could anticipate. I closed my eyes, tilting my head back, and lifted my hands up toward the sky. The music made me feel like my feet were only bound to the ground by habit. I wondered if that was how Virissong felt: bound by time and habit to a world he fled to in hopes of saving his own. It was too late now; his world had been gone for eons.
For a moment, that thought seemed very important.
The coven’s song reached a crescendo, and ended.
Silence thundered in my ears, so loud my eyes flew open.
And my goddamned vision inverted again, the flames turning white with flickering gray cores. Blackened branches glowed crimson and white, the fire’s center bubbling a malicious, murky purple. I shook my head, trying to clear away the reversal of colors as I realized the song had been more than just music. It was a spell.
Power exploded upward.
It erupted from the heart of the fire, slamming into the atmosphere so hard it cracked the sky. Darkness boiled down from the stars, shredding the evening sky. Somebody screamed.
Things poured out of the darkness. They were pale, wraithlike, blues and grays and whites against a blackness so encompassing I couldn’t breathe. The fire was a single point of illumination, but even its colors were wrong, struggling through my reversed vision. Sheets of flat color ripped through the sky, like I imagined the aurora to look, only in grayscale or shades of purples and blues that seemed too deep. Spirits leaped from the colored sheets, in shapes and forms I had no frame of reference for. They were horrible, distorted and cruel, their faces pulled long to accommodate teeth meant for tearing and rending. They were neither human nor animal, and sometimes not even something in between. They taloned their hands, clutching at me, at the coven, then whisked away through the black power. They were made up of legends: names for some of them settled behind my ear bones, painfully intense knowledge that forced its way into the front of my mind. Stone giants called a-senee-ki-wakw; flint-winged monsters from the stars; mistai who haunted the dark and sad places.
They hated. Trapped for more time than I could comprehend, they only wanted to be free and to wreak destruction on a world that had rejected them. Panic surged up in my stomach, making me cold as I scrabbled for a foothold against them, anything that could help me build a wall and stop Hell from being unleashed on Earth. I had no support from the coven: they held fast, pulling the edges of darkness farther open. I spared one glance around the fire, hoping to find the desperation I felt in at least one face.
Instead, I found ecstasy.
Faye’s blond hair was strung out wildly, her mouth open and head flung back. Her skin glowed blue, as if she stood under black lights, her eyes dark pits and her open mouth swallowing down, or injecting, power. She looked like she was screaming, but her expression held fierce joy, not fear.
At the third point of the triangle, Marcia stood with her teeth bared, a terrible grimace distorting her face. But I could see and feel the power emanating from her; there was no rejection in her. From one face to another, I saw the same things. Even Garth, whose earnestness I had trusted, cried out in silent, joyful abandon, tears spilling down his cheeks.
I set my teeth together and prepared to dig down to the core of my being, and call up the power to stop this. There was a gut-level certainty in me: even if the earth itself were willing to share power with me, the effort would kill me. I wished, desperately, that I’d said goodbye to Gary.
And then, like Pandora’s Box, hope came.
Nothing outward changed: the silence still shrieked in my ears, the sky still boiled black. But the intent of the specters pouring out of the black hole we’d created seemed to change. The body-confused chill of sunburn swept up from my bones, making me shiver, making a bubble of sickness in my tummy. I swayed, and the boy next to me, more aware than I expected, put his hand under my elbow, supporting me. I glanced at him; his eyes shone with hope and excitement, even through my distorted vision.
Spirits like the ones who’d tumbled and mock-fought over Gary filled the sky. One caught my eye, a lion with tufts missing from his mane, and I wondered if the badger was nearby, carrying a tawny victory prize. More fantastical creatures, honochenokeh who were benevolent spirits; oni which had no visible form, but were life-force personified; other beings, some nearly human and some from pure legend, rolled out of the gap, chasing down their nightmare counterparts and disappearing into the sky. I looked for the thunderbird, and for Coyote, but saw neither of them in the mad rush. Even so, a sense of safety overwhelmed me.
The fire burned out in one impossible burst, swallowing the sparks it had thrown at the stars just one breath earlier. The column of power cut off, and all around me the coven members collapsed to their knees, as if they’d been supported by nothing more than the sky-rending light. The rip of blackness sealed shut, leaving twilight skies again, and suddenly I could hear distant voices.
They weren’t laughing anymore. They were raised in alarm and confusion: the overhead activity hadn’t gone unnoticed, even if our bonfire had. I stared up at the sky, trying to grasp the implications of what we’d done, when Garth grabbed my arm.
“It’s time to go,” he said in a low, urgent voice. I startled and shook him off, staring first at him and then at the other coven members, who were scrambling to their feet and hurrying away.
“What? Why?”
“Because that was way too much magic to hide. Can’t you hear people coming? We’ll get in trouble if we’re found around the smoking ruins of a bonfire in the middle of the park.” Garth was smiling brightly at me, his colors fading from inversed. “Did you see it, Joanne? Did you see what we did?”
I looked back up at the healed sky. “We let monsters into the world.”
“Light and dark,” he said earnestly. “We can’t have the good without the bad. You felt all the goodness, too, didn’t you?”
I nodded slowly. The strength of the spirit animals and benevolent ghosts still lingered beneath my skin. I reme
mbered Colin’s snake, and Gary’s tortoise, and smiled suddenly. They’d have a lot of company now.
My vision went completely black, and I fell over.
* * * *
Monday, June 20, 5:04 a.m.
I woke up around dawn, more feeling the time in my sunburned bones than actually knowing it. The ceiling above me was unfamiliar, gold sparkles mixed in with the ridges of plaster. The corners of the room seemed dim, which, after a few moments’ consideration, I realized was due to the lights being off. I thought about my whole body, from toes to the top of my head, and decided that while I needed about eighteen weeks of sleep, I didn’t hurt, so probably all was well. I pushed up on an elbow.
Like a sledgehammer crashing into the side of my skull, a headache announced its disapproval of my moving. I groaned and put a hand over my eye, trying without much focus to will the headache away. What qualified as a headache for a car? Being too cold to start in the morning? The body rusting out? I settled on the too-cold analogy and tried to think my car warm again. Absolutely nothing happened.
Faye appeared in a flurry of worry, sitting down on the edge of the couch I lay on and feeling my forehead. I groaned again, even though her hands were cold and felt good. “Where am I?”
“My apartment. You passed out last night. We were worried. I thought you might not want to go to Garth’s, and nobody knew where you lived.”
“What time is it?” I didn’t trust the internal chronometer.
“I don’t know, like five in the morning. The sun’s rising.”
Guess I should’ve trusted it. “Have you been up all night?”
“Mostly. I napped a little, but I was worried about you. We all were. Are you all right, Joanne?” Her eyebrows drew down over her puppy dog brown eyes. I tried to work up a smile, got as far as a grimace, and gave it up as a bad job.
“I—” I started, then yawned so big it felt like my head was going to split open. I groaned again. “Do you have any aspirin?”