by Sarah Kleck
“I really thought I’d never see you again,” he whispered, holding me as if he’d never let go again.
“I thought that, too,” I answered and rubbed my cheek against his.
Jared slowly detached himself and looked into my eyes. His look was honest and filled with love. He put his hand over my heart and placed mine on his heart, both our hearts hammering loudly. Then he kissed me. First on the cheek, then on the lips. I felt his hand run down my spine. His touch was tender and light. Yet I perceived it so intensely that my skin sensually tightened. He hugged me tighter and, suddenly, something changed. The way I felt in his arms was somehow different. From one moment to the next, I knew that this was more than a comforting hug.
Jared’s breathing picked up its pace, and mine did, too. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. Then he kissed me as he’d never done before. As if he’d always held back. My lips melded with his. His fingers brushed over my collarbone, then slowly wandered downward. I felt as if I was going to burst when they slid over my breasts. I tilted my head back. We stroked each other. First cautiously, then firmer, more demanding. My fingertips wandered over his hard abdomen. He bent down, kissed the hollow between my neck and shoulder. My legs felt like Jell-O. I thought I was melting when he pulled me in, even firmer. He raised his head and looked at me with his wild blue eyes. I was swept away. Heat rose inside me, streamed through my body, and pulsated in my belly. Flames burned brightly inside me. He had already touched me, stroked me, caressed me so many times before. But this time was different. There was no longer a need to be cautious. I was almost as powerful as he was now. He no longer held back. No. We’d go through with it this time.
A throaty sound escaped my lips, and Jared seemed to completely lose control. His fingers closed around my waist, dug into my behind. His mouth wandered along my neck and back to my lips. I opened them and met him with my tongue. My hands trembled with desire as they moved down his torso. I didn’t want to wait any longer. I heard my blood flowing in my ears and found the buttons of his jeans and yanked them open. He pulled my top over my head in one skillful motion. His hands returned to my hips and moved forward. I dug my fingers into his hair and pulled. He unzipped my pants with his right hand as his left pulled them over my legs. Then he stripped off his own pants. I took his face into my hands and kissed him. Without inhibition, without embarrassment. It couldn’t be fast and firm enough. He let my bra snap open. I pulled it over my shoulders, and then he pulled me over to the water. I stripped my panties off and tossed them. Jared’s boxers lay on the shore. We slid in. It was warm, almost like a bathtub. The lights danced on the water. Our magic shone, immersing the grotto in a golden-green shine. Then he pulled me into the water and let me feel how much he desired me.
We cuddled on the shore. My head rested on Jared’s chest. The water gently washed over our legs, tickling our feet. Though we were naked, I didn’t feel cold. An unfamiliar heat pulsed through me. We just lay there in each other’s arms. Jared finally fell asleep, and I listened for the regular flow of the air with which his chest lifted and lowered at every breath. I could probably have lain there for the rest of my life listening to that sound. And maybe we should have stayed in the cave. Just the two of us. Forever. I closed my eyes. What a thought . . . for a second I was lost in it. Then I opened my eyes, took a deep breath, and slowly got to my feet. There was no point in delaying any longer. Better to get it over with. I swallowed hard, casting a glance at Jared’s peacefully sleeping face. The memory of his promise gave me the strength to turn around.
I moved to the water. The steady waves splashed around my ankles, and I breathed in deeply. It was harder than I thought possible. I was doing the right thing, there was no doubt about that, but my emotions overcame me. I was glad Jared slept—I didn’t want him to see me this way. He surely would have tried to stop me if he saw me suffering like this. I took another step in. The water was up to my knees. Then I took another step and another until the water was at my hips. I was petrified. Then I let the magic rise one more time. I spread my arms. The grotto was immersed in a shimmering green light. It was reflected on the pool’s surface. Everything pulsed. Every one of my cells. I felt the power flow out of me and took a last deep breath.
I dove under.
And released the magic.
CHAPTER 14
“Oh, Evelyn. I’m so sorry.” Jared took me firmly into his arms. I was still naked when I came out of the water, but I felt naked without magic. More than that. Amputated. A special part of me was missing. The extent of my sacrifice exceeded the power of my imagination.
“We’ll return. I promise!” Jared said, full of passion. He was so aware of my pain that his voice cracked.
We just stood there for a while beside the source, and I let him hold me. It took a while for me to find my voice again. I didn’t dare speak until I was sure it would be steady.
“Let’s go” was all I had to say.
The walk down the mountain was exhausting. I still felt uniquely connected to this wonderful place, but without magic, I just felt like any idiot walking down a mountain.
Weak. Tired. Slow. Worthless.
Why was it so hard for me? Why did I suffer so much from this loss? I’d lived without magic before, for nineteen years—so why did I feel incomplete now that everything was back to normal?
I looked at Jared and at once felt guilty. He looked the way I felt. Could it be that he was suffering even more than I was because he saw me suffer? I swallowed and tried to pull myself together. I had Jared back—that was all that mattered.
“Ready?” Jared asked, taking my hand.
I only realized we’d arrived at the portal when I looked down and noticed the smoke-like fog snaking around my ankles. The time had come to leave Avalon. I looked around one last time to see dozens of pairs of eyes light up among the trees. They had come to say farewell. An iron fist gripped my heart.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered into the woods, praying that I’d be able to keep this promise.
I straightened my back and nodded to Jared, and then we plunged into the fog. He didn’t let me go, firmly held my hand, and led me. Soon it became difficult to see my hand before my eyes. I shuddered at the thought of what awaited us. The carpet of corpses, Zara turning into an awful snake-like creature, groaning women, crying children with soulless eyes . . . those images were etched into my memory.
Soon we had left the silver fog behind. I was on the lookout but couldn’t see anything in the fog. No dead, no damnati, no phantoms grasping for me—nothing. Nothing but the uniform, shifting whiteness. At first, I didn’t know what it meant, but then I understood that all the horror I had experienced before must have been Morgana’s handiwork. Now she’d lost her power over Avalon, and the fog and phantoms had disappeared with her. The fog was no longer terrifying. I looked at Jared, about to say something about not being afraid, when his expression changed. My eyes widened. I followed his look. There! The outline of a shadow. I held my breath and grasped Jared’s hand even tighter.
Had I been wrong? Were the apparitions still here? Jared squeezed my hand as we marched on.
There was a figure sitting on the ground. Jared headed straight for it—a dark-blond shock of hair over muscular shoulders.
“Fuck!” Jared shouted. He ran ahead without letting go of my hand, pulling me after him. I suddenly realized who was sitting on the ground.
“Colin!” I shouted, as Jared sprinted the last yards toward him, grabbed his shoulder, and shook him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jared wanted to know as he searched for injuries. Colin was completely out of it. His legs were stretched out, his shoulders slumped. His head was tilted forward, and his arms hung limp. His hands rested in his lap, and every muscle was slack.
“Oh God, what’s with him?” My voice sounded far too shrill.
Jared examined his best friend’s body one more time. Lifted his eyelids, pressed his fingers on the jaw joints to open Colin’s mouth, looked in his ears.
“Nothing.” Jared’s voice cracked.
I couldn’t see anything that might have caused his condition, either. Did he have internal bleeding?
Suddenly, Colin opened his mouth and mumbled.
“What?” Jared and I asked simultaneously.
Colin was totally out of it, as if paralyzed. He might as well have been on another planet, he was that unreachable. It was strange to touch someone physically when they were so remote.
“Can’t you do anything?” I asked Jared desperately.
He grasped his hair with both hands. “If he were injured, I could try to heal him, but like this . . .”
Jared and I stood helplessly beside Colin.
Colin mumbled again.
“What?” Jared asked, grabbing Colin again by the shoulders. “I can’t understand you. What happened?”
Colin’s lips trembled. “Sss . . . all . . . yyy,” he mumbled. “Saaa . . . llyyy.”
I knew what was wrong with him. “The fog!” I shouted. “The mirages in Morgana’s fog!” My memory conjured up those hideous images. Colin must have seen terrible things, just as I had. His fog nightmare must have something to do with Sally. I grabbed him by the collar and forced him to look at me. His eyes rolled.
“That wasn’t real, Colin! Whatever you saw in the fog wasn’t real! Those were just phantoms, conjured up by Morgana, do you hear?” I shook him. It was as if I were trying to wake a comatose patient. “Nothing but delusions. None of it is real. Do you hear me, Colin?”
“Saaaaally,” he mumbled again, this time more clearly. His look steadied.
“There’s nothing wrong with Sally,” I assured him. “She’s at home in Oxford, sitting bored stiff in some lecture.”
Suddenly, his eyes cleared up, and he looked at me.
“Go on,” Jared encouraged me. “It’s working.”
“Colin, whatever you saw, none of it’s real,” I repeated. “Sally’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with her. Do you understand?”
He hesitantly nodded.
“Come,” Jared said. “We’re taking you to Sally.”
Colin nodded again and tried to get up. He was too weak and had to lean on Jared. He kept tripping over his own feet.
“He’s really gone,” Jared moaned under Colin’s weight. “We’ve got to get out of here as fast as possible.”
I nodded and forcefully walked on. Only a few yards to the human world. Then, we left the fog behind us . . . and landed in the middle of chaos.
CHAPTER 15
“What the hell is this?” I yelled, exasperated.
Hundreds, no, thousands—no, tens of thousands of people were partying around us. Young women in shorts and crocheted tops stomped about in rubber boots, dancing ecstatically in the mud. A guy who looked as if he’d just had a lobotomy drummed without rhythm on a set of homemade bongos. He only wore one shoe. Beside him, a couple rolled in the mud, uninhibitedly making out. The two bumped into a young woman who was giving a palm reading prophesizing a long and happy life. Mud splashed my pants. I sidestepped a guy who’d wrapped his T-shirt around his head. He yelled, “Mud surfing!” and slid on his belly into a huge puddle. Four others dove in behind him.
My eyes widened with disbelief. Where the hell had we landed? Behind us, men and women were playing chicken and trying to shove each other into the enormous puddle. Others were sitting farther back where one guy played a guitar, another a tambourine. They were in a circle on the mushy ground, offering up an exotic version of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” and heavily drugged—or that’s what it seemed like. A redhead in a colorful hippie skirt was walking on her hands around the song circle. She wasn’t wearing any panties.
Jared, who had more than enough on his hands keeping Colin upright, looked around, confused. Suddenly it dawned on him. “It’s the Glastonbury Festival,” he said in a flat voice.
As if on cue, the penetrating sound of an electrical guitar started up.
“The Who—woo-hoo!” a girl with a wreath of wild flowers in her hair shouted as she charged downhill. I looked after her. Only then did I realize the extent of the chaos. The huge terrain of the Summerland Meadows surrounding Tom Tower had been transformed into a giant tent city. At its foot stood a huge, pyramid-shaped stage on which The Who were playing a melancholic tune about a sad man with blue eyes. Thousands of people enthusiastically partied along.
“The Glastonbury Festival?” I asked, taken aback. “But that’s not till the end of June . . . Wait a minute—how long have we been in Avalon?”
“Hey you,” Jared asked a guy walking by. “What day is it?”
The guy looked back, startled. “Um, Sunday.” He looked at us as if we’d missed something really obvious and pointed to the spectacle on the pyramid stage. “The Who are on. The big acts are always on—”
“What date?” Jared interrupted sharply.
“Um . . . the twenty-eighth . . . I think.”
“The twenty-eighth?” I repeated skeptically, then used my fingers to count. I looked at Jared in disbelief. “We were gone for two weeks.”
He’d come to the same conclusion and nodded. “It was only three days in Avalon. Time must move slower there. This means Morgana has a much greater lead than we thought.”
I wanted to say something, but Colin suddenly broke out in heavy sobbing. It took me a moment to realize what had churned him up. But then I heard it. The Oasis song circle had finished “Wonderwall” and now was trying its hand at “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” At the line “So, Sally can wait,” Colin’s floodgates had opened, and he clutched Jared.
“She knows it’s too late as we’re walking on by,” the group sang, out of tune, as Colin’s legs gave way.
“Pull yourself together, bro,” Jared admonished as he tried to pull Colin up.
“Her soul slides away,” the improv circle sang.
“Saaaaaaallyyyyy,” Colin cried. His nose was running.
I rolled my eyes. “We’ll never find Morgana here,” I said, resigned, looking around at the turmoil. “She’s probably a million miles away by now.”
Jared, still supporting Colin, nodded with a sour expression. “I still can’t feel her energy.”
“And Ruth has probably gone to the ends of the ear—”
Just then I saw a black cloak slip through the crowd.
“Damnatus!” I shouted, and started running.
“Stay here,” Jared ordered, placing Colin on the ground with the Oasis singers where he’d be inconspicuous. Then he followed me.
“Where?” Jared asked.
“There, up ahead.” I pointed at the flowing black cloak as it cut through The Who’s audience. Jared and I charged after it. The wind whipped about my ears, blew hair into my eyes, and robbed me of my sight. I plunged into the crowd and bumped a guy who spilled his beer over the person in front of him. The latter turned around and pushed the guy with the beer, who tried to rescue the last of his slopping drink with a balancing act. There was no passage, no gap between the tightly pressed bodies. I used my elbows to move ahead. Hands pushed back. A few even hit me. Jared showed up next to me, pushed in front, and cleared a path. Were the others noticing the angry flare-up of his magic?
“Jared!” I tried to draw his attention, but he didn’t seem to hear. He moved forward, focused as if he knew exactly where the damnatus was. A dark-haired woman bitched at me and pushed me in the back as I wormed past her. The crowd abruptly pushed me in the wrong direction, and I was separated from Jared. He fought his way through, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to him. It cost us valuable seconds, and Jared lost the damnatus’s trail. He searched in all directions.
“Ugh, man, you stink!” I heard someone call ahead of us. Then I smelled it myself: the unmistakable rotten damnatus aroma. There he was! Jared leapt. It was impossible to overlook the glow of his magic.
“Cool special effect,” a spacey curly-head said appreciatively, raising his hands, presumably to have Jared high-five them.
“Jared!�
� I yelled again, because everybody could see that something was different about him. But he was furious. He landed in the tight pack, spread his arms, and grasped a black hood. He yanked the figure toward him. But instead of the damnatus, he had grabbed a terrified festivalgoer by his Foo Fighters hoodie.
“Shit!” Jared shouted, frustrated, and let go. He furiously looked around.
“Alien!” a girl shrieked, pointing at Jared with wide eyes.
“Jared!” I cried, trying to draw his attention to the rather obvious magical aura surrounding him. He finally noticed and looked down at himself. Then he closed his eyes, breathed in, and dimmed the light. The girl frowned, startled, as if she was wondering if she was imagining things.
“I can’t sense the damnatus’s energy anymore,” Jared said, still busy gaining control over his magic. “There are way too many people and way too many energy fields.”
We stood in the midst of the press of the festival crowd. The Who played the last chords of “Behind Blue Eyes” and the crowd broke out in tumultuous applause. The damnatus was gone without a trace.
“Fuck!” Jared roared. He usually didn’t swear, but he was obsessed with finding Morgana. That stinking cloak-wearer might have provided a clue.
“Let’s look after Colin,” I suggested, taking Jared’s hand. It took an eternity to struggle back through the crowd and up the hill again. When we got there, Colin sat crying in the mud, just as we had left him.
“Come on,” Jared said affectionately and pulled him up.
Suddenly, I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “Enid!” I ran toward her and threw myself into her arms. Irvin rushed to Jared to help with Colin.
“Evelyn! Jared!” Enid exclaimed. Unbridled joy spread across her face. “You made it!” she whispered into my ear, hugging me as tightly as she could. She looked up. “You were gone for so long, we thought . . .” She stopped, noticing Colin. “Colin. Oh God. What happened? Is he . . . how did you . . .” She hurried to them and examined Colin with expert hands. For a moment I felt irritated but then remembered that Enid was a doctor and knew what to look for.
