by Jim Johnson
She gingerly stepped over a candle and rested a hip on the edge of the bed, keeping her arms folded across her chest. She stared at my face for a long time in silence. I could tell from her expression she was thinking hard, looking for the right words. I didn’t dare break the moment with a word or gesture.
Finally, she said, “When I was in high school, some of my girlfriends and I got together one night with an Ouija board and a couple bottles of wine my friend Jasmine had stolen out of her parents’ stash. We had a great time pretending that the board actually worked, spelling out stupid messages about our boyfriends, girlfriends, or teachers. It was all a bunch of bullshit, but it was fun.”
She sniffed, and then nodded toward my crystal. “This isn’t bullshit, is it, Rachel?”
I sensed from the tone of her voice that she knew the answer, but I answered anyway. “No, Abbie. It’s real. As God is my witness, it’s real, and I’m both terrified and excited all at the same time.”
She scooted a bit closer to me on the bed. “What are you terrified about?”
I stared at her, hot tears running down my cheeks. “I’m terrified of what I’m becoming, and I’m terrified that I’m going to lose you because of it.”
She slowly reached out a hand and clasped it over one of mine. “Oh, Rachel. I am so tired from work that I barely even know what to say. But, for now, just believe me when I say that whatever’s happening with you—with this crystal, the candles, whatever…we can talk about it and solve it. Together. Okay?”
She squeezed my hand and leaned in to rest her forehead against mine. “It’ll sound crazy as hell, but it’s going to take a little more than…all this…to lose me.”
I blinked away the tears. It was more than I could have hoped for. I nodded against her, at a loss as to what else to say.
Chapter 31
IN THE AWKWARD SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED, Abbie excused herself to get ready for bed and I forced myself to try and will the crystal to stop glowing. I had managed to dim it down to a quarter of its earlier intensity by the time Abbie returned to bed.
She crawled into bed. “I guess we don’t have to buy a nightlight now.”
I returned the smile and kissed her gently. It still felt like we were on tentative ground, so I accepted the cuddling and relaxed into the bed and her warm body next to mine, marveling at how fortunate I was. I wanted nothing more than to curl up with her and talk about everything, to try and tell her about all the wondrous things I was learning, but…I was still scared to tell her too much. If Abbie walked out on me, or threw me out, I didn’t know what I’d do.
Abbie started to snore a few minutes in, confirming her earlier statement that work had worn her out. I sighed quietly, making a mental note to try and make some time to have a serious talk with her. I shifted slightly to get comfortable with her in my arms. I stared at the ceiling, and my thoughts drifted from Abbie and on to Malcolm and his sister, but also about his newly-revealed ability with the ley energies.
Shooting fire from his hands… Jesus. The more I thought about it, though, the more I figured it had to be a similar application to how Bonita and I lit candles the other day. Just…less controlled. Maybe all Malcolm needed was some help meditating and finding a calm center to work from in order to control the threads.
I snorted to myself. Yeah, right. Like I knew what I was talking about. Like Malcolm would sit still long enough to meditate. I sighed, listening to Abbie quietly snore next to me. I wasn’t about to wake her up. Even with my need to talk to her about what was happening, she was clearly working hard and needed some rest.
So I settled into the bed and let my thoughts drift back to the meditative state I was in before Abbie had walked into the room. I opened my Eye and sought out the glowing blue ley threads, and found some easily enough. Somehow it was easier this time—perhaps practice did make things easier.
I called up my mental image of the spiral again and started back down the path, delving deeper toward my center, pulling the ley threads along with me, wrapping my etheric self in their comforting glow.
As I traveled down the endless path, those vague voices at the faint edges of my mind started to creep in and I hesitated. Were they getting louder the farther I went down the path, or were they just there all along and I was just now noticing them?
My first thought was to shutter them out again, to continue down the path in silence, wrapped in the comfort of the ley threads. But…some instinct that had been buried deep within encouraged me to open up, to reach out to them. Hearing voices might not be the most normal thing to do, but at least hearing them meant I wasn’t alone.
Or maybe I was just going crazy.
I sensed the wrongness of that statement the moment I thought it. This wasn’t crazy—this was real. Something had been unlocked within me, and as far as I could tell, there was no going back. Miss Chin had implied that I had a choice, but I bet she knew what kind of bullshit that was.
I visualized a clearing in the path along the shining spiral, and found a flat area of glowing light that acted as the ground, and settled my etheric form on it. I crossed my legs underneath me, opened my Eye and my mind, and slowly, a little at a time, started to let the voices in.
I couldn’t make out words. Somehow the voices were muffled beyond my understanding. Perhaps I didn’t have enough training, or didn’t know what I should have been listening for, but the voices were there, and while I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I did get a distinct sense of mood from them. Most of them sounded confused, but not frightened or terrified. They were just…lost and uncertain.
God, could I identify with that.
I drifted, letting my thoughts roam loose, letting the indistinct voices wash around me, feeling strangely comfortable in this weird world. I even sensed tears rolling out of my physical eyes, dampening the pillow beneath my head. My consciousness was in two places simultaneously—in the bedroom with Abbie, and within the ley threads, with my thoughts and the voices of the lost.
Wondering why I was crying, I focused on that and it hit me. I really couldn’t go back. The Rachel who was alone, and terrified, and drifting from moment to moment… While she was still a large part of me, she was slowly being replaced by someone else. I didn’t quite know who that person was—the mirror I reflected on myself was pretty damned clouded—but it definitely wasn’t showing me who I’d been.
There was so much I wanted, so much I didn’t know. How would taking on the calling of a Beacon change that?
No good answer came to mind, but no bad one either. I let loose of the sadness and the fear and just let myself drift away, letting the etheric currents carry me farther down and down into the spiral. The blue threads all around me faded from sight even as the voices faded from my hearing.
Chapter 32
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED SLOWLY, AND I DRAGGED my eyes open to find I was still in my bed, in my room, in the same house. Abbie had gotten up before me. She was dressed and ready for work. Somewhere in my meditation I had lost the night and the morning.
She leaned down and gave me a quick kiss. “I gotta get to work to finish up this project, but I promise we’ll find time to talk about…” She gestured vaguely toward my crystal pendant and the candles strewn around the floor. “Well, you know.”
Her face was unreadable, though I chalked that up to me still being full of sleep grogginess. “I love you, Rachel. If nothing else, remember that.” She left the room with a little wave.
I dragged myself out of bed and checked my phone to see if Miss Chin had texted me. Nothing. I bit my lip, considered texting her, but then dropped the phone onto the bed and spent a few minutes stretching and breathing, trying to knock the rust out of my morning-fogged brain.
The house was thinly-controlled chaos first thing in the morning, with my roommates rushing here and there trying to get ready for their days. There was just one bathroom on our floor for the four of us—me, Abbie, Penny, and Cooper. The girl in the basement had her own half
-bath, as did Vinya, who lived on the main level in the smallest bedroom.
After waiting quietly in my room for the sound of Cooper and then Penny leaving the house for work, I ventured out into the hallway and to the bathroom to take care of things, and then returned to the bedroom.
Miss Chin had left a text while I was taking a shower, and I frowned at the terse message. “Meet me at the small Washington Monument in Canal Center, ten AM sharp. Lunch afterward, my treat.”
I didn’t know where Canal Center was and didn’t realize there was both a large and small Washington Monument.
Puzzled, I got dressed and then sat on the edge of the bed and called up the map on my smartphone. The program cranked up a location after a couple moments. Canal Center was in downtown Alexandria, just a few miles away, along the coast of the Potomac.
I pulled up the bus schedule and found the best route from the house. I had about twenty minutes to burn before having to get to the bus stop, assuming the buses were running on time.
After a quick breakfast I headed out, making sure all the lights were off and the oven wasn’t on. I had no interest in getting chewed out by Penny again. I was sure she’d find a new issue to complain about, but at least I had those few parts covered.
I got to the bus stop just ahead of the bus, and settled in for the half-hour trip from home to Canal Center. I largely ignored the other passengers and the world around me as I swapped between my phone’s GPS to track the trip progress and getting updates on my friends on Facebook and email. I then lost myself in a new cat-focused game I had downloaded, wondering what it would take to entice some of the cats to come visit my little digital house.
The trip through Old Town Alexandria was uneventful save for a lot of jostling and shoving as the bus moved into the more heavily-commuted sections of town and more people, mostly business workers and shoppers, got on and off the bus.
I reached Canal Center and got off the bus in the center of several brick office buildings, surrounded by brick walkways and, in the center, a dramatic sculpture garden. They were vaguely Greek in design. One consisted of a large metal arrow stuck into one of the rocks. The arrow was easily twice my height and designed to look like it had broken off at the shaft.
I did a slow turn, taking in the office buildings and the sculptures, and saw the nearby Potomac River glittering in the sunlight. I followed the brick sidewalk toward the river, walking past a long, narrow pool lined with black rocks. The pool was empty, the spigots dry. Given the inconsistent weather we’d been having lately, I guessed they wouldn’t actually turn on the water until the spring.
In the center of the empty pool was another quasi-Greek sculpture panel, this one of a person’s mouth. It was designed in such a way that water, when it was on, would shoot out of the mouth and into the pool. I made a mental note to try and remember to come back with Abbie in the spring. It’d be a pretty walk along the river and there was no shortage of restaurants within walking distance—if there’s one thing Old Town Alexandria doesn’t hurt for, it’s good places to eat.
I moved past the empty pool toward a low brick wall that carried another pair of quasi-Greek sculptures. I had to revise my thought from Greek to Roman—one of them had an assortment of letters carved in a Roman-like type; just random letters, though, not any recognizable words.
I walked up to the wall and looked over, realizing that the pool and the courtyard I was standing in was some thirty feet higher than the river’s edge. Looking down I saw a semicircular amphitheater, some twenty rows of stone bench seats built into the arcs.
The focus of the amphitheater was a small stone scale model of the Washington Monument, maybe thirty feet tall. I had no idea why there was a miniature version of the Washington Monument here—the real thing was barely five miles north of where I stood.
Miss Chin was sitting on the bottom bench of the amphitheater, with an electronic tablet in her hands and her phone sitting on the bench next to her. There was a set of stairs leading down and around the bench seats to either side, so I went with the right one and worked my way down and around the benches until I got to the ground level, and approached Miss Chin.
I sat down next to her and gestured to the tablet, which displayed text written with strange geometric shapes. “What are you reading?” I didn’t read as much as Abbie, but was always looking for a recommendation.
She shut off the tablet and then glanced at me. “It’s an old treatise on meditation techniques, written in Archaic Sumerian. It’s a good read, if rather dry. The old ways were so formal. But...” She raised a finger. “We’re not here to trade book club recommendations.”
She smiled to take any sting out of the statement. She gestured toward the stairs. “Shall we?”
Miss Chin led the way up the brick steps of the small amphitheater, to a narrow platform set into the back of the amphitheater. The stairs I had used to descend to the base of the amphitheater arced to either side of the platform, creating small alcoves to either side. Along the back wall of the platform was another series of those quasi-Greek/Roman sculptures. These had been designed to look like damaged statues or frescoes. There were two separate, single eyes, a nose, and part of a broad mouth with large, pursed lips.
Set into the back, below the landing where I had looked down upon the amphitheater, was a recessed area that at first glance looked like a false door. On closer inspection, it was an arched opening that had been bricked over at some point.
Miss Chin moved to the approximate center of the platform, and raised her hands to either side as if to encompass the whole amphitheater. “What you see before you is not as it seems.”
I looked along the brick wall and fake sculptures. “I don’t see anything special.” So far I was unimpressed.
She gave me a thin smile. “That’s because you cannot see very well, as yet. You have caught a glimmering of the possibilities, but need the equivalent of arcane glasses in order to bring it into focus.”
“Makes sense. What do I need to do?”
“For the moment, be silent. Be still.” She nodded to me with a slight smile, which I guessed to mean that she meant no offense. She nodded toward a business woman passing through from one stairway to the other, looking mystified as to what we might be doing there.
Once the woman had passed out of sight, Miss Chin held her hands out to either side of her body and whispered some words that I couldn’t make out. They were spoken low, lower than I could easily discern, and they sounded like a foreign language—harsh, like German.
At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It was just me and Miss Chin on the top platform of a brick amphitheater. But then I felt a cold chill whip through the area, and while we were standing just a few feet from the Potomac River, this felt far more...unearthly.
It felt a lot like the unnatural cold I’d first felt at Branchwood.
Miss Chin continued to chant in the strange language, and lifted her hands slowly, first to her waist, then her shoulders, and then straight up over her head.
The hairs on the backs of my hands and my arms started to stand up, as if some sort of electric charge was building up in the air around us. I looked around in surprise. The blue ley energies, by now a familiar sight to me, were changing the color of the air around us, tinged with an almost a lime green color. I could actually see threads of green writhing around the blue threads in time to Miss Chin’s arm movements.
As the arcs of green energy tendrils thickened and eventually joined to form a dome around us, Miss Chin pulled her arms in, crossed them across her chest, and called out, “Werde licht!”
There was an audible popping sound. I jumped about half a foot in the air. All of my fingertips felt like I’d just been shocked, like when you build up static charge and touch a friend and set off the little buzz. Only this was ten times as strong and just as surprising.
I blinked a few times and smoothed the hairs down on my arms. “What was that?” I stared at Miss Chin, who was looking
at me with a somewhat smug expression on her face.
She indicated the blue and green swirling dome all around us. “This is a warding dome. It’s meant to keep prying eyes away from what we’re doing. We can look out of it and see things normally, in spite of my own green cast to the energies, but anyone outside the sphere cannot see in.”
I frowned. “Won’t they be suspicious of a big green energy dome in the back of the amphitheater?”
She shook her head. “The exterior of the dome has the ability to bend light around it in such a way that someone looking at it will effectively be looking around it. They won’t see it.”
“But...if they don’t see it, what’s to stop them from walking right into it?”
“You ask a lot of questions, but that’s to be expected.” She sighed, and almost sounded exasperated. I guessed that she probably hadn’t had too many students.
“This particular warding spell also carries a charm on it, one that gently encourages passers-by to choose an alternate route. As yet in my experiences, no one has accidentally or purposefully run into the dome.”
I nodded, still not quite understanding. I looked along the curve of the dome, noting that it encompassed the false archway set into the side of the brick wall as well as most of the statuary and sculptures erected along the wall on this level.
Miss Chin focused on me again. “I mentioned it yesterday, but I’ll remind you now. I am what’s known as a Warden, and, among other things, it is my charge to monitor broken areas of the Veil and to prevent intrusions into our mortal realm.”
I blinked at her a couple times. “To translate, you mean you keep an eye on a rip in the Veil and keep bad guys from getting in to our, uh…meatspace?”
Miss Chin closed her eyes, took a breath, and exhaled slow. She gave me a long-suffering smile. “More or less, yes.”
“So why are we here?” I glanced around, seeing neither a rift in the air nor a bad guy about to attack.
