by Rhavensfyre
“No, you don’t understand. Look at their shadows.” Rohanna pointed at the ground.
“So? They have shadows, I don’t understand, Ro. Everything casts a shadow.” Alex was confused now. Why did this bother her so much?
“Look at the sun, Alex. It’s almost noon.”
Alex squinted at the cloudless sky, then back at the ground. A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature crawled down her spine and she instinctively stepped back, away from the nearest shadow. It danced and twisted against the burnt grass, stretching toward them like a living thing. Alex pulled Rohanna farther away from the unnatural circle. There was no way she wanted any of those shadows falling across their feet. Alex looked around her; not a single tree or rock cast a shadow against the noonday sun, yet each misshapen stone held one.
“What is this, Rohanna? Why do they have shadows?”
“They’re trapped, Alex. Their souls haven’t been set free, and they are in pain. How they suffer! I cannot bear it. I can hear them screaming, inside here,” Rohanna said, tapping her temple.
“What can we do? They were witches, Ro. Perhaps this is their punishment?”
“No, I will not have them here, poisoning this place. Alex. They were evil, yes, but they were also tainted by Bellaria’s touch. They deserve another chance. If not in this life, then in another. Please?” Rohanna had tears in her eyes. Alex brushed them away, awed that Ro could shed tears even for those who had tried to hurt her.
“You are an incredible woman, you know that?” Alex asked, lifting Ro’s chin up so she could look into her eyes. “Do you truly want to free them?”
“Yes!”
“Then we’ll do it,” Alex said. “You can free them, Rohanna.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you are the Gatekeeper, Rohanna. There is no one else like you in this world and there hasn’t been in many, many years. You control the stone circles. I told you that morning. I lied to Bellaria about being able to take her to the Shadow Lands, yet she believed me. Why?”
“Because the stones responded to you. I heard them singing,” Rohanna said.
“Exactly. You heard them, Rohanna. You made them sing, not me. I was able to take Bellaria because you knew I needed the Gate opened. You opened it, for me.”
“How? Bellaria tried to teach me. I failed every time.”
“You didn’t fail, Ro, you won. Every year, against everything she ever did to you. You fought against her and refused to give her what she wanted. You didn’t fail because you couldn’t open a Gate for her, you won the long battle. The power has always been yours, to use or not. If she did anything, it was to make you strong, resilient…stubborn. These aren’t bad things to be, but you shouldn’t have been subject to such abuse to gain these skills.” Alex caressed Rohanna’s cheek, wiping away a single tear before it could fall.
“That night you thought I saved you—but it was you all along. You saved us both.” Alex turned towards the circle. “You’ve done this before. There is no one here forcing you. Save them, Ro…give them peace.”
Rohanna nodded and put on a brave face, then marched towards the stone circle. Alex struggled to remain behind and let her do this alone. Maeve, I swear. If this hurts her, I will hunt you down myself. Controlling a stone circle was one thing, Rohanna intended to destroy this one. There was no other way to free the souls trapped there.
Rohanna reached out and tentatively touched one of the stones. Alex growled when the thing shimmered and reshaped itself. Stone does not move. Rohanna reached out with her other hand and touched the next stone. A drumming sound, loud and dissonant, echoed throughout the clearing. Power flared around her and the scent of dry lightning filled the air. Alex felt her eyes bleed through, blue on blue, and her skin crawled with the need to shift. Here were thirteen women that deserved the type of justice she was made for, what she had been born to do. She knew without a doubt that if she let her NightMere loose, she would shred those souls for the crimes they committed.
Alex dropped to her knees. Thirteen heartbeats hammered against their granite prisons, each begging to be let free. Stone hearts couldn’t bleed, but she could hear them weeping, assaulting her ears with the cries of damned souls.
“Rohanna! I shouldn’t be here; I can’t be here. Not while you do this.” She dug her hands into the barren soil until she felt the bite of sharp gravel digging into her palms.
Suddenly, Shyann was at her side, pulling her up out of the dirt. “Alex! Listen to me, you are more than this. Not just Mere…not just Fae.”
Shyann grabbed her arm. “Look at your wrist. Your father’s gift to you, remember? Alexandria, remember who you are.”
Her tattoo flared to life, coiling beneath her skin to remake itself into a new pattern. The sacred horse of Epona still rode within the flowing lines, but now another design made its way to the surface. “It’s all I know,” Alex rasped. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“You do know, just like Rohanna knows.” Shyann’s voice changed. “You two have such a journey ahead of you. I promise you that all your questions will be answered in time, but right now you have to help Rohanna.”
“How?”
“She can destroy the circle, but if she does…”
“The souls will shatter with the stone,” Alex finished Shyann’s sentence. That can’t happen, Alex thought. In a moment of clarity, she realized why the fates had brought them together.
“Free them, Alex. Don’t let their deaths weigh on Rohanna’s soul.”
Alex pounded the earth with both fists. “I am more than this.”
She took a deep breath, and exhaled inside the world of dreams, surrounded by thirteen women’s nightmares. The shifting views moved around her like a mad kaleidoscope in an unsettling view that made her stumble like a drunken sailor. Here, the witches were not stone, yet they could not leave their place inside the circle. They writhed in agony, hot tears ran down their faces as they howled out their grief. Alex bared her teeth. White and strong and meant for rending, they now gathered the witch’s souls as delicately as a child plucked flowers from a field except these flowers tasted as greasy as frog carcasses and smelled just as bad.
Now what? She hesitated, unsure what to do next.
A dark figure beckoned to her from the edge of the clearing, urging her to leave the circle. “Hurry, there is danger.”
The stones song changed, vibrating with a crystalline hum that inched towards the edges of human hearing. She broke into a wild gallop a second before the world went black, then felt herself falling.
“Holy Hells, but that hurts,” Alex groaned, pulling herself up on her elbows and looking around. The ground around her was a lunar landscape of small rocks and large craters. “Rohanna!”
The sight of Rohanna’s prostate body lying close to the edge of the clearing was enough to make Alex forget about her own hurts. She ran to her side and rolled her over, then breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t broken or bleeding, and that counted for something.
“Ro, sweetie, wake up.”
“Huh, did we do it, Alex? Did we save them?” Rohanna struggled to stand up.
“Easy now, you're still wobbly.” Alex helped her to her knees, then braced herself when Ro leaned on her to stay upright.
Rohanna finally got her feet under her and managed to get a good look at the clearing. The place looked like a war-zone. “Holy crap, did we do that?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“How are we going to explain this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can claim a gas leak. There’s tons of old natural gas wells all over this area.”
“Ugh, I hurt like hell.” Rohanna made a face. “And I feel like I’ve eaten half a pound of West Virginia dirt.”
“Maybe not, but you look like you’re wearing at least that much.” Alex grinned at her.
Rohanna looked down at herself and laughed.
“I think you’re right. Come on, let’s get out of here, I feel the need for a d
rink or two and maybe a bath…or four.”
Rohanna tried, but Alex was still the stronger of the two. After several brave hobbling steps on an obviously sprained ankle, Alex swept Rohanna up into her arms. Her weight didn’t even slow her down, she strode away from the destroyed circle with long, ground eating strides that would get them home in no time.
“I still have so many questions. I feel like I have been living in the dark for so long. I know nothing about your people, let alone my own.”
“I know, and I will do my best to help you. But Ro, you have to understand. You are asking me to go over thousands of years of history. History that has been passed on in legend and myth, so distorted that even I have trouble determining what really happened. Too often, those who were left to tell the tale were the ones deciding what was truth and what was myth.”
“It’s okay, Alex. I don’t need to know everything this instant. We have a lifetime to spend together, and right now, I want to explore us. That is more important than any ancient history, right?”
“Right.” Alex leaned down and kissed Rohanna the way she deserved to be kissed. “I love you, Rohanna, now and forever.”
“And I love you,” Rohanna said, a bit breathless after the soul searing kiss. “I want to go home, Alex. This isn’t home yet, not until I purge Bellaria completely from this farm. Take me back to your place.”
She didn’t notice the troubled look in Alex’s eyes, the fleeting look of guilt that Alex blinked away before Rohanna caught a glimpse of it.
Alex had no doubt that Rohanna meant exactly what she said, but would she still mean it when she found out that a lifetime really meant forever?
“Home it is, then,” Alex said, turning her feet away from the house. The truck was farther away than the house, but she didn’t care. If she had to, she’d walk the whole way home…unless Rohanna wanted to ride. Then there was no limit to where they could go.
EPILOGUE
The overly perky nurse’s aide was all too happy to lead Miss Belinda’s niece to her room. The moment she arrived, Rosalind was informed that the poor old thing hadn’t had a visitor in months.
“It’s almost Christmas, you know. Even busy families try to come up on the holidays and I try to make the place as festive as possible. We even keep a tree in the lobby although we ask family members to leave presents at the desk.”
As she escorted Rosalind through the facility, she kept a running dialogue going, enthusiastic in telling her how well her aunt had been doing. Rosalind wasn’t fooled. She saw through the candy-coated descriptions of Belinda’s “improvements.” The glowing reports were easy to decipher. They were making sure Miss Belinda was heavily medicated and kept their interaction with her to a minimum. She had to resist laughing at the woman’s attempt to reach Belinda.
“She’s in there, somewhere. If she only had a familiar voice to help her back from wherever she’s wandered off to inside her head, she might come back to us,” the aide said.
Rosalind wanted nothing more than to tell the irritating woman to shut the hell up, but instead, she simply nodded and agreed with her.
She knew that Belinda wasn’t wandering around inside that empty head. Her soul was elsewhere, compliments of her cousin, Alexandria. She had to thank her cousin, though, for not being as dangerous as she could be. She may have shredded Belinda’s psyche, tearing her soul from her body without a second thought. But, she didn’t have the killer instinct to finish the job, even going so far as to ensure that Belinda’s body remained intact and cared for.
Rosalind was led into an overly pink room decked out in Christmas red and green. She sniffed delicately, offended at the musty smell of old woman and dirty diapers. Still, she had a part to play so she pretended to smile and be happy to see her aunt, lavishing a kiss on the wrinkled brow and holding her hand affectionately. Belinda stared blankly at the TV in front of her. It might have been a wall, for all it mattered. Straightening up, Rosalind turned towards the helpful aide and thanked her for all her help. The woman smiled, and Rosalind knew she would help her in any way she could. Simple kindness and courtesy was the coin and currency of a place like this.
“Can you please ask the clerk to get the paperwork together? I want to take my aunt home. It’s only right that she should be around family, among those who love and want to care for her,” she said, sending the aide on her way with another pleasant smile. Rosalind checked the hallway, making sure there was no one within hearing range of her before turning back to the old woman cackling away at nothing in particular.
“Well now, Bellaria. Let’s get you out of here and see if we can piece you back together. You made a promise to me, one you have yet to keep. Alexandria still bears the marks of leadership you promised me. They should have been mine, and you are going to make sure that Alexandria pays for stealing my birthright.”
Another cackling fit followed her statement, sending threads of spittle flying from the old woman’s gaping maw. Rosalind grimaced and wiped her sleeve carefully. How disgusting, she thought, but very motivating. A clerk knocked on the doorway, a clipboard in hand along with a sheaf of release papers as well as an outline of Miss Belinda’s medication schedule.
“Miss Strider? All of the paperwork is done. All I need for you to do is sign this release form.”
“Certainly.” Rosalind cheerily scrawled her signature where the clerk pointed at and handed the clipboard back to her.
The clerk looked through the paperwork one last time, then neatly tucked the forms away. “You’re a good woman, taking her home for the holidays like this. She’ll be so much happier with loved ones.”
“Thank you, I’m sure she’ll be much better once she’s back on familiar ground.”
“Oh, one more thing, Miss Strider.”
Rosalind had just turned to leave. She froze and stiffly turned back around, a plastic smile plastered on her face. “Yes, is there a problem?”
“Oh, no ma’am. I was just wondering if Miss Belinda needs transportation. We can get an ambulance van to take her home.”
Rosalind relaxed perceptively.
“Oh, please, call me Alexandria, dear. But no, I have a van waiting outside, if someone could bring us a wheelchair?”
~~~~~~~~~~~
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