- -
- 100%
- +
They all looked at her, questions in their eyes. She returned her gaze to the angelic little bundle with her rosebud lips and gentle coo. She was holding Lilia’s forefinger in her tiny fist.
“What happened to him, anyway?” Tomas asked at last.
“He was hit by a car.” Lilia shuddered at the memory. “I … Oh, there’s so much to explain. Is there someplace we can—”
“We can take you back to our place, but then you’ll be hours away. Are you sure you want to leave him?”
Lilia closed her eyes and felt for the answer, and as always, it came from that deep well of knowing that had guided her this far. “I’m sure that I don’t want to leave him. Not ever again. But I have to. He needs to experience life without the final part of his soul before I offer it back to him. He has to choose. And he has to know what he’s giving up when he chooses it. He doesn’t yet. He needs more time to learn what he’s capable of, what life can be like for him as he is.”
“How much time?” Indy asked.
Lilia shrugged. “I’ll know when it’s time to go to him. That’s all I can tell you.”
She gazed up at the hospital, and her heart ached for her love. “Yes, my sisters. For now, yes. I would love to go home with you.”
Demetrius felt pain, and with it, relief.
He’d been in some other state, not feeling anything at all, and wondering if he’d been somehow returned to the Underworld prison, the dark, sensory-deprived void from which he’d escaped. It was similar to that, the darkness, the confusion, the mind-without-body-attached feeling. Not identical, of course, but that sense of being trapped in a dream, of trying to wake and being unable to—it had been enough to terrify him.
So when he felt the pain of his broken body, it brought a rush of relief so big that he was almost limp with it. Only then did he realize that, as miserable as this physical experience of life had been for him, he did not want it to end.
He was alive. Thank the Gods, he was still alive.
Sighing, he forced his eyes open and blinked the room around him into focus. He was in a bed, a real bed, soft and clean. There were crisp white sheets and warm blankets over him, and one arm was in a cast. He looked beyond the stranger who was sound asleep in a chair beside the bed and took in the white walls, the single window, the TV set mounted on the wall. A long curtain suspended from a track in the ceiling to his right ended his visual tour just as the sleeping stranger began stirring in his chair.
“D-man?” he asked.
Frowning, Demetrius turned his head and realized the man in the chair was no stranger after all. “Gus?” He was … he was clean. He’d shaved, gotten a haircut and was dressed in clothes that looked new. Brown trousers, with a matching suit jacket over an ivory button-down shirt without a stain in sight. “Did I wake up in some other dimension? Or am I dreaming you now?”
Gus smiled. His teeth were still stained yellow, which reassured Demetrius that they hadn’t both died and moved on to some heavenly realm.
“I’m just glad you woke up at all, boss. You feel okay?” Gus got up, went to the foot of the bed and pushed a button that raised the top part of the mattress until Demetrius was sitting up.
“I’m sore all over, but otherwise fine. I think. What is this place?”
“Hospital,” Gus said. Returning to the bedside, he poured water from a pitcher on the nightstand, held it out. “You remember what happened?”
Demetrius sipped the water, thinking, nodding, sipping some more. “I remember the car hitting me. I thought my brief stay in the physical world was over, I’ll tell you.”
“It’s just getting started, D-man. Do you remember before that? You remember the magic that started happening with those treasures of yours?”
At the mention of his sole possessions, a cold bolt of panic shot up Demetrius’s spine, and he found himself looking down, even knowing his blade and chalice couldn’t be at his waist. He pressed one hand to his chest, but his amulet was gone, as well.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Gus said. “I got your things. They’re safe and sound, and so are you.”
More memories returned in a rush, and he brought his head up to meet Gus’s eyes. “What about the woman?”
Gus glanced quickly toward that door, as if to be sure no one was listening in. Then he leaned closer. “That was something, wasn’t it? The way she just flashed into that alley, buck naked, like some kind of Terminator?”
“I don’t know the reference.” While his body seemed to have come preprogrammed with knowledge of language and customs and the ways of the world, he did, on occasion, find things lacking. Pop-culture references were topmost on the list. But mention of the woman sent another shot of ice into his blood. “Where is she?” he asked, all but whispering, eyeing the curtain, wondering if she lurked on the other side.
“Don’t know. She was gone by the time I looked for her. Course I was distracted by your … accident.”
“She just vanished?”
“Or ran away. Who is she? Or maybe I oughtta ask, what is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Gus frowned hard, his whole face puckering. “Now I know you’re lying, D.”
“Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know. But I know you know something. Because when that naked blonde popped in, you were scared, man. I saw it, dead fear all over your face, just before you ran for your life, straight into traffic. As lucky as that was for us, I still wanna know what’s so damned scary about her.”
Demetrius lowered his eyes. “I’m not lying to you, Gus. I don’t know. But you’re right, the sight of her scared the hell out of me.” Then he paused, frowned, looked up at Gus again. “What do you mean, it was lucky for us?”
Gus smiled, yellow teeth gleaming. “I’m not sure it was luck, exactly. You were doing all that visualizing, after all.” He nodded. “That fella who hit you? Drunk as a skunk. But even then, I knew who he was. Everyone knows who he is. Ned Nelson.”
Demetrius pursed his lips, shook his head.
“Owns what they call a media empire. TV stations, publishing companies, radio, God only knows what all. He’s so rich he gives billions to charity. I mean, we’re talking big money, D. Big money. Been rumors he wants to run for President next time around, and I guess they’re true, ’cause he was in a dead panic about being arrested for driving drunk and damn near killing a homeless guy. A dead panic. No one else saw it happen—and I don’t think that was just luck, either.” He shrugged. “So we made a deal.”
Demetrius blinked. “What kind of a deal?”
“I tell the cops I was driving him home, take the rap for driving without a license. They probably know better, but they also know him, so they’re not gonna buck it. And he’ll pay any fines laid on me, hire me a lawyer if needs be. Won’t be, though. You did run out in front of me, after all.”
Demetrius was sitting up in bed. “And in return?”
“He said we could have anything we wanted. So … I got us what we wanted. And enough shares of stock in his companies to keep it for a long, long time.”
“You got us … what we wanted?” Demetrius repeated, trying to process what Gus was saying.
“You remember, don’t you? What we were dreaming about when your trinkets started glowing? You remember. We’ve got it now, my friend. We’ve got all of it.”
2
Lilia walked with her two sisters along the path that meandered from Indira and Tomas’s fairy-tale cottage high on the craggy mountainside beyond the forest, down to Magdalena and Ryan’s reclaimed vineyard, Havenwood. The trees were just beginning to show tiny buds as late March went out like a lamb, morphing into April. It was warm, and the sun was beaming down from a blue sky. And though there was little vegetation, you could smell spring in the air.
Halfway along the path, they emerged onto a level spot with a waterfall out of a storybook splashing into a small rocky pond. Beyond the pond was a cliff, and far below, Cayuga Lake.
“The cave is behind the falls,” Indy said. “That’s where the Portal was. Still is, I guess.”
Magdalena stared at it but didn’t move any closer. Lilia saw the fear on her face. “You really want us to go in there?” she asked.
“We have to close it, Lena,” Lilia said. “We can’t leave a portal to the Underworld just hanging open.” They’d all agreed earlier that closing the Portal should be their first order of business on this, Lilia’s first day there, but now that they were facing it, Lena appeared to be having second thoughts.
“Come on, it’ll be fun.” Indy clapped her sister on the shoulder. “Our first spell together in three-thousand, five-hundred years. What’s not to like about that?”
Lena didn’t even crack a smile.
When they’d gotten home late the night before, it had been decided that Lilia would stay with Indy and Tomas at their cottage. Lena’s place, though larger, was already housing her and Ryan, along with Ellie and Lena’s mother, Selma. Bahru, the Hindu holy man Ryan had sort of inherited from his father, occupied the guest cottage but spent most of his time in the house. He’d become the world’s most unconventional nanny, Lena said. He was almost as attached to the baby as her parents were.
Indy cleared her throat, drawing Lilia’s attention back to the matter at hand. The Portal. “You have to dash through the edge of the waterfall to get into the cave,” Indy said. “We’ll get wet.”
“I remember.”
Indy frowned. “But you’ve never been here before.”
Lilia only smiled and cupped her cheek. “Big sister, I’ve been watching everything play out. You know that. You saw me.”
“In mirrors. In visions. And then at the end—”
“I was here with you. I saw it all, the struggle right here and that twisted old priest, Father Dom, falling from the cliff after trying to kill you. Attacked by a wolf.” She shook her head sadly for a moment, then smiled. “A wolf under the control of Demetrius, you’ll recall. A trace of the man he once was, shining through. He couldn’t let you die. Just as he couldn’t try to take your baby,” Lilia said, shooting her eyes to Magdalena’s and holding them by force. “Right at the end, he couldn’t go through with it. You know that.”
“I don’t know any such thing.” But Lena averted her eyes.
“And just before that wolf came,” Lilia said, turning to Indy again, picking up where she’d left off, “your brave, beloved Tomas threw himself in front of a bullet for you and was gravely wounded. It was I who healed him.”
Indy’s look of surprise changed instantly. Her face went soft, and she wrapped her arms around Lilia so hard it almost hurt. “I knew it was you,” she whispered. “Thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
When she could pull away from her sister’s fierce embrace, Lilia looked into her eyes. “It’s what this whole thing was about from the start.”
“What is?” Indy asked.
“Love. It’s all about love. Love destroyed, love denied, love betrayed, love that outlives death and defies all the rules of the Universe to fulfill itself. Your love for Tomas. Lena’s love for Ryan. My love for Demetrius. Demetrius’s love for the King he murdered to try to save us, because of his love for me. All of that is eating away at him, still, though I don’t think he remembers any of it. It’s still there in his fractured soul, the love. It’s all the same. All of it. If we can focus on the love, we’ll get through this.”
Indy nodded very slowly, then glanced over at Lena as if to make sure she was listening. She was. Raptly.
Coming closer, Lena asked, “Do you still have the ability to heal people, Lilia?”
“No more than a garden variety witch has, which is plenty. Being in spirit form it was just a more direct current to Source, I think. But I did bring a little something extra with me.”
“What?” Lena asked, her eyes eager.
Lilia was glad to give her something to distract her from her fear. “I have the power of enchantment. I can get anyone to do anything I want—with the usual limitations, of course. It can’t go against their true will. I just sing my will to them.”
“Nice,” Indy said as Lena grinned and nodded her agreement.
A cold breeze whispered across Lilia’s neck, and she shrugged deeper into the shawl she’d borrowed from Indy. “What about the two of you?” she asked. “Once the magical tools were returned to Demetrius, did your powers go with them?”
“No,” Indy said, speaking before Lena could. “I was going to ask you about that next. I still have the telekinesis.” Indy looked around, spotting a pomegranate-sized rock on the ground near the falls and pointing at it. “Watch.” She waved her arm with a flourish, and the rock shot into the air, arcing across the front of the waterfall and then splashing down into the pond.
Lilia smiled broadly. “Very handy!”
“I’m kick-ass at martial arts, too, without a day of formal training. But mostly I never have to land a blow. I can strike without touching, at least physically.”
“It’s the energy that hits them.” Lilia nodded toward the pond. “Can you put the rock back?”
Indy shrugged. “Never tried.” She pointed toward the ripples still radiating from the surface of the blue-green water, swung her arm again, and the rock burst out and sailed in the general direction it had come from, hitting the ground and rolling several more feet before bumping to a stop against a tree trunk.
Lilia nodded. “You can slow it down, move things deliberately, precisely. It just takes practice.”
“I can?” Indy looked at her forefinger. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What about you, Magdalena? Did any of your powers remain after your mission was accomplished?”
“Scrying.” She walked to the pond and looked at the water. “I’ve always been very good at that, ever since I was little, seeing visions of our past in ancient Babylon in my mother’s scrying mirror. But the ability seemed to get turbocharged when I had the chalice. And that didn’t fade away after the chalice vanished. Give me a cup of water or a candle flame or anything, really, to focus on, and I can see all sorts of information in it.”
“And sometimes she gets visions without even looking for them. They just pop into her head,” Indy put in.
“‘Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone and truth you’ll know,’” Lilia quoted softly. “Can you ask for and receive specific information?”
“I try. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, and some unrelated random thing pops up instead.”
Lilia nodded. “You’ll get better with practice, too. Though I don’t imagine we’ll get to keep our abilities very long. We set all this into motion long ago, to restore an innocent man’s soul and free him from a prison beyond imagining. The Gods allowed it, apparently even granted us the skills and powers we’d need to make it happen. But once Demetrius accepts the final soul-piece, our mission ends. We’ll probably go back to being normal.” She looked from one sister to the other. “Or as normal as any witch can be.” Her sisters laughed, and she felt herself tearing up. She knew that if Demetrius refused her, she would die and be separated from her sisters again for a long time. But she pushed that thought away. “It’s so good to be together again.”
“Group hug,” Lena said, pulling her sisters into her arms. They leaned their heads against each other, and Lilia closed her eyes and saw them as they had been so long ago. Three harem slaves, with wild raven hair and deep brown eyes that hid the mysteries of the forbidden craft taught to them in secret by their mother.
They’d died together. While casting one final spell together. And together they were going to bring it to completion at long last.
Finally they separated again, and it was Lena who looked at the cave. “Let’s get this done,” she said. “I want to get back to the baby.”
Together they strode to the falls, pulling their shawls over their heads and dashing through the icy spray into the darkness beyond. Indy drew a flashlight from her backpack and clicked it on, aiming the beam down nature’s dark corridor. “This way,” she said.
As they began walking every step echoed, and even Lilia felt a shiver of fear rasp up her spine after they’d gone a couple of hundred feet. “We’re close,” she said. “I feel it.”
“It’s right here.” Indy pointed at a smooth stone wall without a single unusual characteristic. “Or at least, it was.”
“Maybe it closed on its own,” Magdalena said, reaching toward the wall.
Lilia caught her wrist, stopping her from touching. “It’s still here. You just can’t see it until someone activates it, or there’s an energy surge or something. Watch.”
She bent low, picked up a pebble and tossed it at the wall. It did not ping against the stone and bounce back. It vanished instead, swallowed by a soft blue glow. And then the wall changed before their eyes as that glow widened, morphing into a swirling oval of blues and greens that looked like sparkling water but defied gravity.
“Yep,” Indy said. “That’s just how I remember it.”
“Get the gear out, Indy,” Lena said.
“I’m on it, I’m on it.” Indy was already pulling her backpack around, kneeling, removing items one by one. A shell, a sandwich bag filled with herbs, a vial of holy water, a lighter, a geode, a box of sea salt, a red candle. She set the items down on the cave floor, quickly filling the geode with sea salt and the shell with the herbs.
“Ready,” Indy said then. “Let’s kick the tires and light the fires, ladies.”
They moved to form a circle around the items on the cave floor, then stood still, eyes closed, heads lowered, as they prepared themselves for magic. When Lilia lifted her head, the others did, as well, and when she looked into their open eyes, they had turned dark brown, just as they’d been in the past, almost black, channeling the witches they had been, melding them with the witches they were now.
Lena picked up the geode filled with salt and spoke in a voice that was deeper, more powerful than her usual tones. “What was open, Earth now seals.” She moved the dish of salt in a widdershins circle, spiraling it inward, making smaller and smaller passes each time.
The swirling oval grew smaller as she worked, and then she stepped back and placed the salt back on the floor. Then Lilia picked up the shell, which was filled with angelica, sage and rosemary. Touching the lighter to the herbs, she got them smoking thickly, then stepped forward. “What was open, Air now seals.” She moved the smoking herbs in the same counterclockwise spiral pattern, and the Portal continued to shrink.
She stepped back and placed the smoking herbs on the floor but let them continue to smolder.
Indira stepped forward with the red candle, its flame dancing. “What was open, Fire now seals.” She moved the candle in the same diminishing spiral. The candle flame hissed and spat and shot higher, until the Portal was only about eighteen inches in diameter.
Lilia picked up the vial of holy water and removed its ornate stopper. This time, they stepped forward together, Lilia in the middle, shaking the bottle at the Portal, sprinkling it with droplets of water, her hand following the same shrinking spiral pattern. “What was open, Water now seals,” she said.
Then they all spoke as one. “What was open, the Goddess now seals.” They moved their hands in unison, shrinking the swirls of light on the wall.
The Portal became a tiny dot of unnatural light that could have come from someone shining a laser pointer at the stone face. Lilia stood very close to it. “Thank you for what you returned to me, Portal. Your task is complete. Your energy can now return to Source.” She gazed at the dot and snapped her fingers.
It blinked out.
“It is done,” she said.
Both her sisters sighed in relief. Indy starting picking up the items they’d used, blowing out the candle, smothering the herbs until they stopped smoking. She dumped the remaining herbs in a line in front of where the Portal had been, right along the edge of the wall, and poured the salt alongside them.
Lena dug several little herb sachets from the backpack. “Same herbs we just used, and some onyx to boot. Just to make sure it stays closed.” She lined the tiny drawstring pouches up in a row beside the herbs and salt on the floor.
“Can’t be too careful,” Lilia said, dampening her fingertip in holy water and drawing an equal-armed cross on the now-solid stone wall. Then she poured the remaining holy water along the barrier they had created on the floor.
When everything was packed up, they headed out of the cave and started hiking back down the hill, toward Lena’s place, Havenwood, where her mother was preparing a massive welcome home dinner to celebrate Lilia’s arrival “properly.”
“I’m surprised that went so well,” Indy said. “Tomas and I tried to close it once before, you know. I didn’t realize we’d failed.”
“I think it’ll stay closed this time,” Lilia said. “But we’ll check periodically to make sure. I’m afraid the challenge we face is the biggest one yet, and we can’t afford to have astral nasties popping in and out of existence on top of it. We’ll need to keep all our focus on what’s ahead.”
“Damn.” Lena lowered her head. “I was hoping the worst was over.”
“I’m afraid not.” Lilia felt sympathy for her but quickly shifted her attention to Indira. I’m going to need the box, Indy. The Witches’ Box.”
Indy nodded. “I have it. But I’ve read all the scrolls in there, and I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to help.”
“Still …”
Indy nodded. “I’ll get it for you tonight, after dinner.”
“Thanks, sister.” Lilia stretched her arms out to her sides, looking down at them with a smile. “It feels good to be human again. Well, almost human.”
“I’ll bet.”
Lena had been silent during this entire exchange, but finally she spoke. “Lilia, what’s going to happen? You said it would be the toughest challenge yet, and you told us before we’d need to get our loved ones out of the way when the time comes, but why? What exactly are we fighting here? I mean, I thought this was as simple as Demetrius making a choice. Either he accepts his remaining soul-piece or he doesn’t, right? So what’s the big deal?”
Lilia licked her lips, trying to form an answer she didn’t really want to give, and then was saved by a soft buzz-buzz coming from Indy’s jeans pocket.
Indy quickly pulled out her cell phone. “Text from Tomas.” Then her expression changed. “Oh, my Goddess.” She looked from the screen to her sisters. “The hospital phoned him. Father Dom came out of his coma this morning. He’s awake and alert.”
“On this day of all days,” Lilia said, shaking her head. “The same day Demetrius first used the tools, the day he called me back into existence. This can’t be a coincidence.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Lena said softly. “We’d better get home.”
Lilia stopped shoving food into her mouth when she realized that everyone was looking at her. Of course, as soon as they saw her noticing, they all returned to their own lasagna dripping with cheeses and sauce and stuffed with mushrooms and vegetables. The bowl beside her plate, where a fresh green salad had been, was all but licked clean. She realized she had consumed about a square foot of the main course within the first three minutes of its arrival. And a couple of slices of warm, buttery garlic bread, too.
She laid her fork down, sipped from her water glass, then set it carefully on the table. “I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed food,” she said. “The sensual pleasure of eating is … I think when you do it every day you forget how incredible it is. All those flavors bursting on your tongue. The taste, the texture. Oh, it’s so good.”
Selma, Magdalena’s mother, smiled at her. She’d been smiling at her the entire evening, and it had been all Lilia could do not to fling herself into the older woman’s arms. But all in good time. “I think that’s the best compliment my cooking has ever received,” she said softly.
“Then,” Bahru said, “we’ve all been lax in our praise. Your culinary skills are unmatched, Selma.” He was a bronze-skinned Hindi who wore red-and-white robes, sandals, dreadlocks halfway down his back and a matted beard.