Through the Veil

by Walker, Shiloh

  A mantra, she repeated it to herself over and over. But there was another voice, his voice, and it was louder, drowning out everything else. You’re nothing but a shadow of yourself . . . a wraith.

  “He talks about me like I’m not real. Like I’m not here,” Lee muttered. She hardly realized she was talking to herself. “I am here. I am real.” The sound of her raised voice startled her and Lee clapped a hand over her mouth, locking the argument inside.

  “Stop it,” she mumbled against her hand. “This is just nuts.” Crazy. That’s what it was. She needed real, professional help. Her hand shook as it fell away from her lips, and she clenched it into a tight fist. A dream had done this to her. Had her shivering and scared, like a child afraid of the dark.

  “That’s it. This has got to stop.” She took a deep breath and left the living room. There was a phone book in her office. The yellow pages had all sorts of professional help. She’d find herself a shrink, get an appointment— today if at all possible. If it took a bunch of pills and hours on a therapy couch, she was going to stop these damn dreams.

  You’re nothing but a shadow . . . Just outside the door to her office, his voice whispered through her mind again. She froze in her tracks. Then she started to run. Lee ran down the hall, tripping over the runner on the wood floor, skidding on her knees to a stop in front of the bookcase where she kept her photo albums.

  “I’m not a fucking shadow. I’m not a wraith. What in the hell is a wraith anyway? I am real. I’m real,” she said, her voice harsh, her breathing erratic. Her hand shook as she opened the heavy cloth-covered board that made up the front of the album. The pictures had been taken last summer, at a barbecue when a friend sold a book to a publisher in New York. Lee preferred to be behind the camera, but this time, she had consented. A few pictures . . .

  Her eyes lingered on the very first one. One of her with her arm linked around Moira’s neck. Moira’s face was clear, her eyes sparkling and bright, all the excitement and joy about her book deal showing in her eyes. But Lee’s face . . . it was like the lens had been wet. Foggy, or out of focus. Jason had been taking the pictures that day. Moira’s husband was a professional portrait photographer. He didn’t know how to take bad pictures.

  Turning the page, she looked from one picture to another, and in every one her face was distorted or blurred. The sob started as an ache in her chest, building as she threw down the album and grabbed another one, this one from when she and Moira had gone to Ireland, three years before her friend had met Jason.

  All of them. Blurred. Distorted. Out of focus. They hadn’t looked like that when she’d put them in this album. She knew they hadn’t. “No,” she whispered. With her fisted hand pressed to her lips, Lee stared at the picture of her and Moira in front of Dromoland Castle. Moira’s face was clear, her smile wide and easy. Her arm was slung around Lee’s shoulders. The image was so clear that Lee could see the numbers on Moira’s oversized watch.

  But Lee? Her image was totally out of focus. Even her clothes looked blurry.

  “No,” she whispered again.

  Her mind whirled, e-mails she remembered coming to mind. Professional portraits she’d had taken to be used with the bio on her website, only to have the photographer e-mail her and tell her they’d need to do the pictures again, the images were blurred. Lee hadn’t bothered with it at the time, hadn’t wanted to mess with it, and she probably wouldn’t have if Moira hadn’t kept nagging her about it.

  With startling clarity, Lee recalled when she’d finally given in to Moira and agreed to let Jason take some new pictures for her to use on her site. Those pictures had been fine. Perfectly fine. She had loaded them onto her computer right after Jason had taken them. They had been fine. They would still be fine.

  Gingerly, she placed the album on the ground and rose, wrapping her arms around her body. She was freezing. She felt so damn cold. Lee stood there in the middle of scattered pictures and albums and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Chilled to the bone, she turned away from the albums and walked to the office, one slow step after another.

  The photos were going to be fine.

  They were great pictures and everything was fine, she told herself as she walked into her office and crossed to her workstation. She sat down at her desk and opened the drawer.

  Rifling through the scattered notes and paper clips, she looked for the envelope where she had put the disk with the picture files. Her hand was shaking as she put it into the disk drive, watching as the computer screen came to life, the flickering lights of her screensaver disappearing as she touched the key.

  The sight of those lights touched another memory in her head.

  That clouded sky. The lights behind a shield of dust, fumes and smog . . . Closing her eyes, Lee whispered, “Sweet heaven. I’m going nuts.” She had designed the screensaver from those lights, like the northern lights she’d seen when she went to Alaska. They’d amazed her, enthralled her . . . but these lights were different. Muted, almost broken. The lights seemed sad.

  “I really have lost my mind,” she murmured. Covering the mouse with her hand, she opened the folder where the pictures were stored. She didn’t have to click on it any more than once before the sob that had been building in her throat tore free.

  “No!” she screamed, standing out of her chair so fast it toppled over. With one vicious sweep of her arm, she knocked the keyboard, the mouse pad and the mouse from the under-the-desk platform, jerking the cords out with vicious pulls of her wrist, screaming as she hurled the keyboard across the room.

  It landed with a clatter on the floor as she turned to stare back at the computer. All the thumbnail images stared back at her. And every single one was blurred, distorted, out of focus. She couldn’t so much as make out the color of her eyes. No.

  Open your eyes . . .

  Like a wind in the desert, the echo of the voice seemed to scorch her flesh, echoing all around her, echoing inside her head. She pressed her hands against her eyes and demanded, “What in the hell am I supposed to see?”

  The world shifted under her feet. Lee gasped for air, throwing out her arms for balance. Noise assaulted her ears, and when she spun around to stare out the window, colors were so vivid, she felt as though she was staring through a kaleidoscope.

  Trees seemed to glow, a golden light emanating from within. She could see each individual blade of grass. Hear the sound of a bird call. The ground still seemed to be trembling, but the leaves outside weren’t even moving on the trees. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. They were trembling, ever so minutely. A fly buzzed by and she whimpered as she realized that the fly was a good forty feet away. She could see it, so incredibly clear, as it landed on one of those minutely trembling leaves on one of the trees that seemed all glowy.

  A wild laugh escaped Lee’s lips as she fell to her knees in front of the window, propping her arms on the sill, tensing as the wood seemed to pulse and throb under her arms.

  Open your eyes . . .

  Lee tried to stand up. But the bones of her legs seemed to dissolve and she collapsed to the floor, darkness rushing up to greet her.

  Lee heard them talking at the table. They were in the other room and they were talking the quiet way adults do when they don’t want you to hear, but she heard them anyway.

  Her head hurt. It felt all funny, like somebody had smacked her across the back of her head and then packed her aching skull full of cotton. Her tummy felt funny, tight and achy, but she couldn’t eat. The food here all tasted so weird. They gave her something to eat called a hot dog. She didn’t eat dogs. She played with them.

  Where had Mama gone? One second the noises had been getting so loud, loud, loud . . . roaring in her ears, and then something wet on her face and the sky overhead was so blue it hurt her eyes. It was pretty though. The sky at home was darker. A deeper blue. And at night, it was so black that stars sparkled like diamonds, huge and bright in the sky and glowing with the red and purple and blue lights of the ’roras. She barel
y remembered the ’roras.

  It had been a long time since she’d seen them. Now, the skies were cloudy and the air was smelly. The monsters did it. Monsters that turned things into fire with a touch, monsters that smelled so bad they made her tummy hurt, and other monsters, monsters that looked like people until you saw their eyes. She hadn’t seen them much. Mama and her hid. Mama really knew how to hide.

  But she still remembered.

  But now Mama was gone. And this wasn’t home. Although the air didn’t smell so gross and the sky was a pretty pale blue, it wasn’t home.

  “. . . found her in a field. The hunter was scared to death he had shot her. She gave him a terrible scare.” That was the lady with the streaky hair. She had nice eyes, but she looked so tired.

  A deep voice spoke up. “I don’t understand it. How can a little girl just appear in that field? The nearest town is seventy-six miles away. And talking to her, you can’t get anything out of her. Nothing she tells you makes sense. Talking about fire-things and smelly monsters. Says the sky here isn’t right. She talks like she used to see the northern lights, but how in the hell would she go from there to here?”

  “Have you investigated anything about a fire? Maybe a chemical fire? Tar or something? It smells something awful when it burns.”

  Lee rolled away, reaching out and picking up a cracker. That was what Miss Carson had called them. Crackers. Crackers weren’t so bad. Salty. Better than the hot dogs. Even if the hot dogs smelled sort of good, she wasn’t eating dogs.

  They didn’t understand her name either. Lelia Rass. That was her name. Lelia Rass. But they kept calling her Leah Ross. Leah was kind of pretty. But Ross didn’t sound right. It wasn’t her name.

  This wasn’t her home . . .

  Lee sat up so fast her head was spinning. Whimpering, she pressed her fists to her head.

  Damn it, how could she have forgotten that?

  Foster kids got bounced around so often it wasn’t even funny, and a lot of them tended to block out memories that weren’t pleasant. But how could she have blocked out something so important?

  She remembered the colors. The colors of the sky—like the colors on her screensaver. The smelly things . . . Jorniak demons. Her head throbbed. Opening her eyes, she stared in front of her, seeing through tunnel vision, like she was staring through a hollowed-out crystal prism. Time slowed to a crawl and she could feel the air pulsing around her.

  Open your eyes, Lee.

  You live there, in your reflection of this world. Reflection.

  She felt a ripple in the air. Then tension. Like a storm was brewing. She could feel it, something powerful, lingering just beyond her reach. Icy cold, she climbed to her feet and stood. She swayed, rocking herself back and forth, and let the power in the air wrap around her. And music—Lee could hear the faint strains of music. Alien music.

  The tension in the air became thicker, heavier, until she had a hard time even breathing it in. Heavy and warm, like maple syrup. She took a step and it was like the air had formed a physical presence, clinging to her. It wrapped around her body like an embrace, caressing her body in a way she had never noticed before.

  Like a floating feather, she drifted into the bathroom, walking past the partial mirror over the sink. Lee pushed open the door to the walk-in closet, keeping her lashes lowered until she was standing mere inches before the mirror.

  When she lifted them, a slight sense of disappointment seemed to fill her, and she felt the tension drain out of her like water.

  Nothing but her reflection.

  Kalen felt it like an electric shock through skin. Her touch. He knew her touch, her presence like he knew the sight of his own hands. All she had to do was be in his world mere moments and he felt it.

  But it was daylight.

  Lee hadn’t stepped foot into his world while the sun shone in years, decades. Cutting his eyes back to the Elder, he tried to follow along as they prayed over the graves of the most recently fallen. It was like the Elder was speaking in some ancient, foreign language though. None of the words made sense. Kalen couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t focus.

  He felt something touch the Veil. It rippled. As attuned as he was to the Veil’s energies, that light touch hit his system with the force of a jolt from a plasma charge.

  Something was brewing in the air. Looking around him, he knew he wasn’t the only one who felt it now. Some of his men and women looked like somebody had jabbed them with a hot piece of iron. Startled, jumpy and worried. Understandable—changes in the air usually came just before a gatestorm—like nature was giving them a warning.

  Kalen wasn’t worried, though. There was no room in his mind for worry, not when it felt like his entire system was singing. This—whatever it was—wasn’t a gatestorm. His mind raced, blood rushing through his veins like he had just run the gauntlet. A muscle ticked in his jaw. His gut was tied in knots and his heart pounded with anticipation.

  Once the final prayers were said, Kalen knelt over Akira’s grave and whispered, “I’m sorry, mycera.” Little sister. He could remember holding her hand when she was a child, and wiping away her tears the day their fathers had died. The men had died together and it had forged a bond between them—until now, Kalen had thought it was unbreakable. “Wherever you are, you’re happier now. God-speed.”

  Before anybody could stop him, he slid through the crowds, eyes narrowed, following that little pulse in his gut. The tension in the air mounted. It had him wound so tight, he felt like he was going to splinter into little bits and pieces if it didn’t break soon.

  And then it did.

  Kalen hit the ground as the earth rocked under him. Distantly, he heard the comm unit at his belt sound off. He ignored it as he climbed to his feet. All was silent. The pressure in the air was gone.

  Kalen felt her. Damn it, he actually felt her. By the time he had reached the clearing outside the encampment, his entire body was tense as a bowstring.

  Slowing to a halt, he stood there, his eyes scanning the distorted terrain.

  With a disheartened sigh, Lee let her hand fall away from the mirror. “I’m insane. I’ve lost my mind.”

  Turning away, Lee tipped her head back, staring up at the ceiling. Under the halter top of her pajamas, a cool wind chilled her skin, bringing with it the scents of things long forgotten. Smoke, soot, something noxious and cloying . . . but below that, something wild, the forest, the air, the earth.

  The earth pitched and rolled beneath her feet. Literally. It threw Lee forward, and she threw out her hands to catch herself before her face got up close and personal with the bathroom floor.

  Throughout the house, Lee heard crashing. As if in slow motion, she looked up and watched as a framed faerie print went crashing into the floor. Something warm and wet flowed down her arm, and numb, she looked down to see blood flowing from the gash in her arm.

  It trickled down . . . down . . . down . . . Dread curled inside her as one fat drop plopped onto the floor. Followed by a second. When the third drop fell, there was a noise, a god-awful noise, like the earth was groaning and screaming. Lee licked her lips and stared, frozen with shock as a crack appeared in the floor, right where the blood had fallen. It raced along the floor toward the mirror, upward. The mirror split in two. The wall behind the mirror cracked. Little fissures ran out from the larger crack and, thankfully, just shy of the ceiling, it stopped.

  The floor shuddered and shook. She heard crashing echo through the house, and the lights flickered off and on. A huge glass bowl fell from a shelf that had hung over the toilet and the razor-sharp shards of it stung her feet. Logically, Lee knew she needed to get out of the house before it came down around her. Oddly enough, she didn’t want to leave. Couldn’t leave.

  She heard—something. That music, a strange, tribal rhythm that pulsed deep inside—calling to her. Her entire body trembled and tears stung her eyes as she stared at the mirror. There was a huge crack in it, one that ran from top to bottom. The left side of the mirror
reflected her broken image back at her. But the right side . . .

  “Oh, sweet heaven,” she whispered. Running her tongue over suddenly dry lips, she reached up and touched her fingers to the surface that she knew should be there, but couldn’t see.

  What she saw was the twisted landscape from some of her work. Dark, brooding, hauntingly beautiful in a disturbing way. Tears stung her eyes, rolled down her face as she pushed her hand against the barrier that had wavered between her world and the other. It resisted. Under her palm, she felt the smooth, slick surface of the mirrored glass.

  She looked down at her other hand. The blood wasn’t flowing as heavily now, but the blood trail on her arm was still wet and shiny. Her hand was slick with it. Without knowing why, Lee looked back at the mirror and then pressed her bloodied hand to it.

  For a second, nothing happened. Then the mirror shimmered. Softened. Changed. Under her hand, it went pliable. It was like pushing her hand through Jell-O, thick, clinging. She hissed out a breath between her teeth and jerked her hand back. The second she did, that weird, tribal music beating through her system swelled to a crescendo. It threatened to deafen her, echoing in her head like drum-beats.

  Demanding. Commanding. With horrified fascination, Lee watched as she pushed against the mirrored glass. It gave under her hand again, and this time she stepped forward, holding her breath as the thick barrier molded to her flesh. For a long moment, the world fell out from under her feet and the breath squeezed out of her lungs. Darkness took her vision. She couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth to scream or to gasp for air, and nothing happened. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.

  It was the most terrifying feeling of her life.

  But more terrifying than that was the bizarre feeling she had done this before.

  Just when her lungs couldn’t take it anymore, when they were screaming for air and her head was spinning from the lack of oxygen, the cloying barrier parted around her body and she stepped onto solid ground. Solid, uneven ground that bucked and rolled under her feet.