by Bill Hiatt
Lucas used capoeira rather than a sword. His speed made it hard to follow what he was doing, but his kicks proved as effective as swordplay in taking out the snakes nearest him.
Since my conversation with Umbra still uncomfortably fresh in my mind, she drew my attention more than any of them—even Lucas. Like him, she moved with speed and skill. She had to move in closer than Lucas did to strike with her dagger, but the fact that even the smallest scratch caused a snake to drop dead more than compensated for the need to get up close and personal.
I would never have admitted this to the others, but I was looking for signs that she enjoyed the violence. Her face was expressionless, and she worked with clinical detachment as she slaughtered the snakes. If she felt any joy from her surgically precise dagger strikes, she betrayed no sign of it.
I saw movement to my left and realized Khalid was flying. From a safe distance, he shot arrows that rocked each snake with a series of explosions on impact. Eva’s bow was less spectacular, but its silver arrows were no less deadly.
Serving as magic backup, Viviane raised mist that seemed to confuse the snakes while Carla cast a spell that made them shrink. Behind them, Magnus played furiously on the lyre, charming the snakes.
Here I was in the middle of an action movie, and I was just standing there like an idiot. I wasn’t exactly frozen anymore, but my self-defense training had prepared me for human opponents, not serpentine ones.
More snakes kept rising from the ground, but Tal and his friends killed them as fast as they appeared. It wasn’t long before Magnus’s music filled the air with so much magic that the snakes were barely moving when they emerged.
However, Tal wasn’t satisfied. “Pull back to the van! This feels like a distraction.”
Magnus kept playing as he moved, and the others kept a wary eye on the sluggish snakes while darting across the street.
“We can’t leave without breaking that spell,” said Viviane. “Innocent people could—”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this,” replied Tal, grinning. “Shar, sword!”
Shar handed him the blade with noticeable reluctance. Tal turned back toward the house, raised the sword, and used it like a ray weapon, shooting an almost blinding emerald light in a broad beam that encompassed the whole property. The snakes fell to dust, and no more emerged.
“Thanks,” said Tal, handing the sword back to Shar. “Double-check me, ladies. Is the spell broken?”
“As far as I can tell,” said Viviane. “We need to find the caster, though.”
“Not today,” said Tal. “Whoever it was clearly expected us to be here. That snake spell looks to me like a trap that was sprung by our arrival.”
“It’s not like us to run from a fight,” said Magnus.
“We need to figure out what we’re up against,” replied Tal. “I’m not an expert in Egyptian magic. Are you?”
“You saw the outcome of the snake trap,” said Magnus. “That magic wasn’t anywhere near powerful enough to stop all of us.”
“I don’t believe it was intended to. I think someone was just trying to keep us busy until sunset—which is only about three minutes away. Now get in the van!”
Magnus scowled, but he didn’t keep arguing. Instead, he climbed into the van with the rest of us. His stiff body language made clear he was still angry about Tal’s choice.
“Apep,” said Stan, staring down at his cell phone.
“What was that?” asked Gordy.
“The hieroglyph scratched into the ground is a symbol for Apep, the enemy of truth and light, the lord of chaos. The Greeks called him Apophis.”
“That confirms the theory that someone knows about Amy’s past life and is trying to use her in some way,” said Tal. “Amy, we’re going to get you back to Santa Brígida, and I want you to stay at Awen for a while, OK? That house is a heavily protected area, both magically and technologically. It would take us a while to get your apartment up to anywhere near that level, even with Mrs. Doyle’s help.”
“Our in-town places have pretty high-grade security, too,” said Magnus. “I think she’d be more comfortable staying with me.”
If Magnus was trying to be protective of me, it was hard to tell from his facial expression. He was giving me a picturing-you-naked stare with those bright blue eyes of his. He was good-looking, but we hardly knew each other, and the last thing I wanted was to be another notch on some total stranger’s bedpost.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what he was thinking, “but I’m a little used to Awen already.”
“From being unconscious there?” he asked. To my surprise, he looked hurt. Was he used to having women just slide into his bed?
The van driver slammed on his brakes so hard we were all nearly thrown from our seats. I could hear squealing tires and smell burning rubber.
“This is terrible!” said Viviane, looking around as if the world were coming to an end. I didn’t understand why. I could tell we hadn’t crashed into anything, and none of us were hurt.
“What’s going on up there?” yelled Tal.
“You’d better see for yourself,” the driver yelled back.
“We’d better all see it,” said Carla. Everyone was looking nervous by this point, so we all got out.
We were still on Clark, and at first, I couldn’t see what the problem was.
“Someone popped open a portal of some kind right in front of me,” said Nancy, the driver, a thirty-something blond who looked badly shaken up. “I tried to stop in time, but we were too close, and the momentum carried us through.”
“It’s closed now,” said Viviane, looking back down the road. “We can’t just drive back through.”
“A portal?” I looked in Khalid’s direction.
“A door from one place to another, or, in this case, one plane of existence to another,” he said as if such things were everyday occurrences. In contrast to everyone else, he looked excited. Even Michael, who was about his age, looked more sick than excited.
“This doesn’t look like another plane to me,” said Jimmie.
“You’re thinking of the supernatural planes connected to Earth, places like Annwn and Olympus,” said Tal. “This looks more like a parallel universe—another Earth in which people made different choices, maybe recently, maybe four thousand years ago, maybe both. Regardless, the result is a different history—and, more important to our situation, a different now. This may look like the same Clark Avenue, the same Orcutt, but things could be radically different.”
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Magnus, pointing to a nearby street sign.
It was in two languages: English and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Through the Looking Glass
Gordy went over to look at the street sign more closely. “This isn’t Clark Avenue anymore. It’s Ramses Way now.”
“We’d better portal back to our world, right?” asked Michael.
Tal squinted his eyes, chanted, and moved his arms in what I assumed was an attempt to open a portal. Nothing happened.
“It’s as I feared. The portal spells we’re familiar with won’t work in this situation.”
“But magic works here,” said Magnus. “I can feel it.”
“I had a long talk with Gwynn ap Nudd about parallel universes once,” said Stan.
Magnus sneered. “Yeah, of course you did.”
Stan ignored him. “It seems a few faerie seers became aware of the existence of parallel universes over time. The faeries have made efforts to reach some of them, but those efforts always failed. After decades of trying, they decided that magic couldn’t accomplish that feat.
“They’re wrong,” said Viviane. “There is a magic residue where the portal was. A spell definitely opened it.”
“As Tal always says, ‘What magic can accomplish is a function of what the spellcaster can visualize.’ We’ve seen that before. Sometimes we’ve beaten enemies because we understood sc
ience better than they did and could see other possibilities than they could.”
“Well, you could, anyway,” said Tal.
“It took both of us,” said Stan. “Anyway, I’ve studied the idea of parallel universes enough to know they’re different from the other planes of existence, like Annwn. Those other planes have natural links to each other and to the Earth to which they are related. The portals we’re familiar with exploit that connection. Parallel universes, on the other hand, don’t have those kinds of links, at least according to one theory. All they have in common is space. Parallel Earths occupy roughly the same space but vibrate at different frequencies. To move from one to another, all we’d have to do in theory is change our frequency back to what it was. The reason the faeries failed was that they didn’t have the concept of frequency.”
“Do you know you to change our frequencies?” asked Tal.
“Possibly,” said Stan slowly. “The trick would be getting the right frequency.”
“Tal, you should study what’s left of the portal we came from before the residue dissipates,” said Viviane. “That might provide helpful information.”
Tal, Stan, and Viviane stood for a while behind the van. If I hadn’t heard what they were doing, I would have thought they were contemplating empty air.
“Don’t worry,” said Khalid. “Stan’s a genius. He knows chemistry, physics, computer science, stuff like that, backwards and forwards. Tal can read the science in Stan’s mind and use it to find new ways to employ magic. You saw how he could take swords with magic effects and use them like ray weapons.”
“Yeah, they’ve gotten us out of many tough situations by using Stan’s scientific knowledge to do something unexpected with magic,” said Eva. Jimmie gripped her more tightly, as if he were afraid she’d disappear.
She was watching Tal. Jimmie was watching her. I knew from my research that she and Tal had once been together. Did the awkward dynamic I was seeing suggest she still had feelings for him?
Now that I could study Tal’s gang up close, I spotted other odd dynamics. Tal seemed to make a point of not making much eye contact with or getting too close to Eva. Magnus, on the other hand, stole glances at Eva all the time—glances burning with desire. Now that I’d seen more of him, I could tell.
Michael, too, looked at Eva, though his gaze was more like an adolescent crush than Magnus’s sexually charged leers.
Did every male in Tal’s family want Eva? No wonder Jimmie was holding on so tightly. Was there a touch of insecurity in the way he gripped her?
I made myself look away from them and out across the land on both sides of the road. This close to the highway, Orcutt had been mostly trees and brush on one side, open land with fences and a cow or two on the other. Now the land on both sides was filled with houses. They weren’t new, but they looked well-kept and fairly expensive. If this really was a parallel universe, it was one in which Orcutt’s tourist appeal had been supplemented by something else that had stimulated the place’s growth.
“OK, I’ve gotten what I can from residue,” said Tal. “We need to find a place where we can work undisturbed.”
“Why not team up with ourselves—you know, the selves in this world?” asked Shar.
“We don’t know if that’s safe,” said Stan. “We might be completely different in this world.”
“You mean I might still be a tool of Ares here?” asked Alex.
Tool of Ares? Another good story, but not the right time to ask about it.
Stan nodded. “Could be. I think the only constant in all the universes is God, so we not only have a different you, but maybe a different Ares as well. It could even be worse than that. This could be a world in which Magnus succeeded in replacing Tal—no offense.”
“None taken,” said Magnus, though his eyes told a different story.
“I shouldn’t have put it that way,” said Stan. “Any of us could be evil here—or we all could be. At the very least, we have to check.”
He pulled out his cell phone and started tapping away on it. I got a closer look this time, and there was something odd about it. It looked superficially like any other cell phone, but there was no visible branding anywhere on it.
“I already tried that,” said Michael. “No signal.”
“No, the carriers may be different, and even if they’re the same, yours wouldn’t recognize your device. But mine’s a Sage Phone, remember?”
To me, he added, “It’s another project Tal and I worked up. It runs on ambient magical energy, and, given a little work, it can tie into any network. Let me just check and see what I can get from a few internet searches.”
“I’m nervous just standing here by the side of the road,” said Gordy.
“The don’t-notice-me spell is still in effect,” said Carla. “I can feel it, and a couple people have driven by without even glancing at us.”
“And if the portal was designed to throw us into an ambush, it’s a remarkably slow one,” said Shar. “I think we’re safe here for the moment. Make it quick, though, Stan.”
“That won’t be hard,” said Stan. “Allying with ourselves isn’t an option. In this world, Carrie Winn—Ceridwen at that point—disappeared mysteriously in 1997. You know what that means.”
“My past lives were never awakened,” said Tal. “I was never drawn into the supernatural.”
“Which means none of us were,” said Shar. “We’re just ordinary people in this world—people who wouldn’t be much help.”
“Or we’re dead,” said Jimmie. “I would never have resurrected.
Lucas nodded. “I’d be dead. You guys wouldn’t have been there to rescue me.
“That’s not all,” said Michael. “Magnus and I would never have existed in the first place.”
Every atom of my being was screaming at me to ask the obvious questions, but now was still not the time.
“I might still be on the street,” said Khalid, who looked as if he wanted to cry.
So Khalid wasn’t really a visiting cousin of the Sassanis? I’d suspected that all along. The back story must be even stranger than I thought.
“Uh, Tal, there’s one other thing I should mention, just so you aren’t thrown off if it comes up later,” said Stan. “In this world, your mom died in 1997.”
“What?” asked Tal. “How? I’ve never heard any stories about her having a close brush with death. What could have changed?”
Tal maintained a calm façade, but his pupils dilated. Seeing his reaction made me think of my own family. Were they all right in this world? I knew they weren’t really my family—yet in some ways, they were. I didn’t know how to think of them. With any luck, I wouldn’t be in the same situation Tal was.
“Like Ceridwen, your mother disappeared. There was evidence of a struggle and of considerable blood loss. The police eventually concluded that she had been murdered. Hmmm…This is odd. A witness actually turned up who saw her…being murdered. Despite that, the police never found a body. As far as I can tell from a quick search, your father never tried to have her declared legally dead.”
“Maybe she isn’t dead,” said Tal. His voice was matter-of-fact, but I could see the sorrow in his eyes. “The killer is clumsy enough to get seen and let the eyewitness escape to tell the tale, but clever enough to dispose of the body in a way that baffles the police.”
“The same year Ceridwen disappeared,” said Carla. “That’s not likely to be a coincidence.”
“It’s also not likely to be relevant to our current situation,” said Magnus.
“She’s your mother, too,” said Gordy.
Magnus was Tal’s actual brother? But if that were the case, why create this elaborate story about him being a distant cousin? And what had Michael been talking about earlier?
The more I knew, the less I understood.
“No, her counterpart in our world is my mother. The woman in this world is no relation to Tal or me, and we can’t help her, anyway. What happened to our counterparts isn�
��t relevant, either. The only thing that is relevant is how we’re going to get out of here. That’s what we should be talking about.”
“Drop it,” said Tal as he raised a hand to preempt Gordy. “It’s a weird situation, but Magnus is right. Our first priority has to be how to get back where we belong.
“To do anything safely, we need to find out what else in this world is different so that we don’t get ourselves in needless trouble. Even more important, we have to figure out where we can get information about our enemy.”
“I can help with the first part,” said Stan. “The info I’m getting from the internet isn’t bilingual like the street signs, so it’s safe to say Egypt hasn’t conquered the United States.”
Tal nodded. “I couldn’t imagine any sequence of events that could have led to that. Why the Egyptian street signs here, though?
“I can probably figure that out by checking Orcutt’s history. Just give me a minute.”
The minute felt more like an hour. From the amount of fidgeting I saw around me, everyone felt pretty much the same.
“Ah, I see. In this world, a developer built a theme park called Lost City around Cecil B. DeMille’s lost city—you know, the Egyptian façade he created out at Guadalupe Nipomo Dunes for the filming of the 1923 Ten Commandments. In our world, that set was buried, and much of it deteriorated before anyone thought about the historical loss and tried to save some of it. Here it was unearthed much earlier and in much better shape, though I’m not sure why. Someone bought up the area.”
“That’s part of a nature preserve,” said Carla.
“Not in this world. Anyway, the theme park didn’t come along until about the same time Disneyland did, but it was wildly successful—so much so, in fact, that it influenced developments in nearby communities like Santa Maria and Orcutt. Orcutt’s tourist area isn’t Old Town Orcutt here—it’s called New Karnak in this world. Judging by the pictures, it’s an Egyptian-themed area that draws tourists who’ve come for the park.”
