She recalled an early October morning when he had stood in place with his arms around her while she clutched onto him for dear life and wept into his chest, her heart brimming with desolation. Gods. Had that really been less than a year ago?
Their roles had reversed. Life never fails to be strange.
When he finally began to quiet and pull away, he said, "You won't tell."
It was such a young, unguarded, and unexpected thing to say she almost laughed, not in ridicule, but in the hope it gave to see his human side peek out.
"It was one of my first lessons. Remember? As a matter of fact it was Kay who taught it to me. What happens with Bad Company stays with Bad Company."
He tried a little smile and it almost happened.
"How about a coffee?" she asked.
He nodded. Turning away she brushed the residue tears away from her own face and went out to get a big, black, and bold with one sugar - just the way he liked it.
When the door closed, Storm turned toward Kay feeling drained, tired, embarrassed, not necessarily better, but different somehow. A step back toward life instead of away from it. His perspective had rearranged itself in the tumbler of emotional upheaval and he thought that maybe, just maybe, there was the tiniest bit of hope that they would find their way to the other side of this.
He remembered that Ram had read fairytales to Elora when she was unconscious and that she’d heard him. So he decided to talk to Kay and tell him they were figuring this out, that they had the world's best tracker, who was also a powerful witch, and that she was working on it at that very moment.
Having said that out loud to his comatose partner, he realized for the first time that he might have a tiny grudging admiration for Litha. He even felt a small, and quite inexplicable, twinge of pride when he had said 'world's best tracker' out loud. Of course Storm wasn't naive. He knew that no power on earth could bring Kay's fiancé back from another dimension. Litha couldn't get Katrina back. No one could. She was gone. Forever. And the devil would be collecting a truckload of pain from Kay when the day came that he had to wake and confront that.
Still, even for a battle hardened, battle weary knight like Engel Storm, there is a miniscule part of inner child that protects a belief in magic. Whether he recognized it or not, whether he would admit it or not, that part of him hoped the beautiful and indomitable, green-eyed witch had a miracle in her pocket.
He told Kay to sleep and dream of honeymooning on a beach in the South Pacific with rum drinks and a bride wearing little or nothing.
When Elora returned with coffee, the two of them walked back to the War Room to join the others for the vigil.
Elora and Storm didn't need to ask if there had been any word. It was easy enough to read the faces that turned their direction when they entered. Ram walked over to Elora, put his arms around her, and then let one hand slide down to cover her stomach as if he couldn't go any longer without making a connection. In hushed tones he asked about Kay's circumstances and she assured him that it was the best situation possible.
***
CHAPTER 12
When Litha was satisfied that she had learned all she could from Aelsong, she turned to Heaven for a briefing on incubus demons; insight into their known characteristics and typical behavior.
Breakfast was a dismal event and most of the food went untouched. Litha told Kay's friends and colleagues that she would retire to her sanctuary where she would try to track Katrina and would let them know the results, one way or the other, by mid afternoon.
Litha went to her room first where she filled a large, old fashioned, porcelain tub with hot water and sea salt. She soaked for twenty minutes, clearing her mind and her aura of emotional turbulence - her own and what she'd picked up from the others as a result of this experience. Some of it was quite resistant to expulsion. Afterward she assembled a collection of clean clothes, not worn since they were laundered. She pulled on black tights with no feet, a black leotard, a wrap around skirt, ballet slipper flats, and the pendant necklace she always wore.
Litha's "offices" were far from what would typically be pictured when thinking about someone's workspace. She occupied two rooms adjacent to the Ancient Books section of the library that had been designed according to her direction, specifically to her needs. The Ancient Books section was seldom accessed which made her corner of the east wing a very quiet place to work with few distractions - just the way she liked it.
The room that could be entered from the hallway looked very much like a traditional office except that all the wall space featured floor to ceiling shelves. Considering that the ceilings were twelve feet high, that was very impressive. Her shelves were filled with books and all manner of curious goods. Some belonged to The Order. Some were part of her personal collection. The only furniture in the room was a chair, a large carved chest, and a large French rococo desk, black with gilded accents, and priceless if it came up for auction at Christie's.
On entering she went straight to the pretty window seat. She pulled the cushion and decorative pillows away, then lifted the solid wood top that formed the seat and set it aside. Inside the hollow space was a heavy carved chest secured by a modern combination lock that had been warded making it highly unlikely that anyone other than she would ever open it. The ward was designed to confuse the mind of anyone trying to focus on the numbers because they appeared to blur, transpose, and shift.
After removing the lock, she opened the chest and withdrew a hooded cape made of red velvet. Then she unlocked the wrought iron, French door behind her desk and stepped over the threshold of her small, private terrace into the motorized hum of an Edinburgh morning. She shook the cape out in the sunshine being glad, for once, that she was on the east side of the building and that there was sunshine that particular day. After twirling it about in the air a few times, she was satisfied with its essential "cleanliness" so she reentered locking the terrace door behind her.
The room she thought of as her inner sanctum was protected by a keypad lock with wards similar to the one used on the chest lock. She punched in her code, donned the cape, removed her shoes, opened the door and stepped inside feeling the muscles in her body relax even more.
The room was round. The architect had initially grumbled about wasted space, but she had persuaded Simon by pointing out that maximum results require maximum equipment. The east wall featured a small window, placed high up, with wind chimes hung from the ceiling so as to hang in front of the window's perfect center. Another wall featured a fine stone fireplace that looked considerably older than the building in which it was housed, as if it had been transported from elsewhere and reassembled. Another wall featured a fountain flowing from the mouth of a dragon faced gargoyle into a wide pedestal bowl. The last wall featured an indoor garden of herbs and flowering plants that were thriving with a combination of magick and semi-fluorescent lights.
The walls and ceiling were painted the same pale gray as the polished, flag stone floor. Litha went immediately to the fireplace where she lit seven candles of various colors. The small window provided some light, but not so much that the reflection of the candle flames couldn't be seen on the smooth stones.
Other than the features representing the four ancient elements, there was nothing else in the room except for the large globe in the center of the room nestled in the cradle of a priceless dragon's wings. The centuries-old dragon statue, beautiful, powerful, and magnificent in its own right, had been taken from a pagan temple in Teutonia two millennia past for safekeeping else it be destroyed by misguided Christians like so many other thousands of priceless artifacts.
Objects of power are not created deliberately nor do they spontaneously spring into being. They come from humble beginnings, being no more extraordinary than a typical river rock or knife or fork. Objects become infused with power when energetic residue is repeatedly transferred from beings with accumulated magickal power. The exact number of contacts that equals critical mass is non-calculable.
&nbs
p; Sometimes objects of power are identified by those who are either talented or proficient in the occult. When not discovered as such, their energy sometimes goes awry, their very presence wreaking havoc without intent, direction, or cause. The Order had been collecting these artifacts for centuries, rescuing them from destruction by zealots and protecting the human population from the effects of wayward magicks. The location of the treasury had moved around from time to time, often dependent on wars and the dangers they posed.
At present the artifacts not in use were stored in what many agreed was the best location to date: the western boundary of Idaho Springs, Colorado. The vaults were located deep under the Rocky Mountains – which would withstand any destructive device available to date. It was cool, dry, near the Interstate, and only an hour away from a major airport. In short, a perfect storage facility. The excavation currently underway in Brazil was rendering frequent additions to the cache. Only an institution with The Order’s connections could remove articles of antiquity from the locations of their discovery with impunity.
It was Litha's great honor to have the dragon temporarily in her keeping as he had been recognized as a potent object of power and in service to magick for millennia. The proud Teuton dragon currently served as The Order's own version of Prometheus, silently holding the world on its shoulders while also protecting its treasure: a precious crystal ball held lovingly in its curved claws. The multifaceted crystal ball picked up every color in the room and reflected it back onto walls and ceiling as rainbow prisms. The effect was a space that was magical as well as magickal. Litha’s dragon, and she thought of him that way as she was his temporary caretaker, was charged with several tasks and he performed each admirably.
The globe, rendered in shades of green and brown, was perhaps a foot and a half in diameter and hinged very much like one of those liquor cabinet parlor tricks. It would separate at the equator and become two parts of a sphere, one half stationary, one half lid. When opened, it revealed one of Litha's two most prized treasures, a concave, black glass, scrying plate the same diameter as the globe's equator. The dragon stand had been built so that, when standing barefoot, the scrying plate was at exactly the same height as Litha's navel.
She reached out and lovingly ran her hand over the dragon's head as if he was a living pet. Sometime during the past two thousand years, his eyes had been replaced with black glass. The candle flames and rainbow prism danced together in his eyes making them seem so intelligent and lifelike that it was easy to imagine him as a familiar.
Litha pulled her red robe closer as she paid homage to the Spirits of the Four Winds whom she would be summoning to assist with Locating Magicks. Real witches are risk takers, comes with the territory. Even so, few witches would dare wear red when practicing the magickal arts because the color red possesses powerful attraction properties. That means red can be a shortcut in summoning, but also attracts the bad as well the good. Litha came from a rich history of witch ancestors who tended to act according to a philosophy of "great gambles bring great rewards" and, at some point, it had become part of the family's genetic legacy. It was partly natural to her and partly logical since Litha knew she was powerful, or practiced, enough to hold a sufficient protection barrier while admitting friendlier Powers of Assistance and accepting their help.
The witch took up a large purple candle and began circling the globe in the center of the room in a clockwise direction. She carefully counted nine revolutions as she sang an old medieval melody with lyrics written and substituted by the witch, herself. Her singing voice was quite pleasant although the quality of performance would have no bearing on outcome. The melody was not more magickal because it was medieval. It was simply a useful hook on which to hang the quatrains she had quickly, but specifically composed for chanting which would be crucial to outcome. She wrote the four-line rhymes in her head while she was bathing and now repeated them in magickal form while she raised energy by stirring the atmosphere into the equivalent of a small whirlwind.
After completing nine circles and chants, Litha used the flame of the purple candle to light a large white candle with three wicks. She then sprinkled a mixture of Dragon's Blood resin, Solomon's Seal, white sage, and crystalline salt directly onto the candle's flames. When the herbs caught fire, she invited into the circle those who could be of service whether spirits, guides, or elementals with the caveat that they were welcome so long as they wished her well and would not prove to be a lot of trouble later on.
When she was satisfied that conditions were optimum, she opened the globe. She always felt a rush of satisfaction upon viewing the gleaming surface with alphabetical, numerical, alchemical, and Theban script symbols etched on its surface in circular patterns. Taking hold of the pendant necklace that she always wore, she pulled downward to remove the outer cover which was a crystal with planed edges forming a heptagon. No one would guess that the crystal was a cover disguising a pendulum of black opal, perfectly weighted for scrying, encased in a Celtic knot filigree of white gold matching the necklace chain.
The pointed stone was the rarest black opal, alive with deep red flecks called "fire" by jewelers. Litha's pendulum had been hand crafted for her by the monks of Cairdeas Deo and given to her on her sixteenth birthday. Or, rather, the day that had been arbitrarily established as the day they would celebrate her birth.
That birthday was a milestone because it was the day she had been given the freedom to legally drive by herself. In the process of celebrating by doing exactly that she came across a scene that would forever be etched in her heart: a pink Italianate villa sitting high above the Sonoma Coast with vineyards terracing toward the sea, neighboring hills covered with flowering yellow mustard so that it looked like something from a fantasy. She had pulled the car over, taken a mental snapshot, and knew that someday she would drive through the gate and it would be hers.
She ran her finger over the pointed end just to reestablish the connection - which was never really broken.
When she held the pendulum over the glass, it immediately dropped into place and stilled, awaiting instructions from its mistress. She began to trace Katrina's name, one letter at a time, while picturing Katrina - replaying the snapshot moments of their brief time together - and "hearing" the sound of her voice. Then she began to add details about Katrina's current situation and state of mind that were gained from Aelsong's visions.
By the time she reached the "i", the pendulum was moving on its own to complete the specification ritual. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see candle flames dance and flicker as if a draft had blown through the room. For Litha spontaneous movement of air was a more or less commonplace occurrence, at least when she was scrying. If others preferred to think of the phenomenon as invisible, or discarnate entities, it made no difference to her.
She closed the globe and moved so that she was facing Scotia, then held the pendulum above it simply saying, "Where?"
The pendulum did not move. Which was a first. Frowning, Litha repeated her command a little more firmly, "Where?"
No response.
She lowered the pendulum, took it in her hand, and rolled it around in her palm a few times while deliberately focusing on an image of Katrina.
Again, she held the pendulum above the globe. "Where?"
No response.
Remembering that Aelsong said Katrina was no longer in the same reality, she decided to alter the question. She held the pendulum above the globe and asked, "Near where?"
Almost instantly it began to pull toward the east like it was magnetized. Allowing enough slack so that it could go where it wanted, Litha allowed the point to slide over the map of Europe. Across France. Past Genoa. It came to rest just south of Florence. Siena.
"Got it."
She quickly returned the pendulum to its pretty crystal housing, thanked the Powers That Assisted while politely and respectfully dismissing them, unwound the charged energy of the room by retracing her steps in the opposite direction, doused the candles,
and reset the keytouch lock on the room as she left. Litha knew that people were anxiously waiting for some word from her, but nonetheless some tasks cannot be hurried. She removed her red robe and carefully rolled it up to fit in the top of the carved chest that held her most precious, personal tools. She renewed the wards on the lock, replaced the window seat so that no one would be the wiser, secured her wrap-around skirt, and hurried upstairs.
The atmosphere in the War Room vibrated with tension. Every now and then Storm would venture out into the hallway, look up and down then walk back slowly. Just so he could feel like he was doing something. He had just exchanged a look with Baka and sat down on the end of a sofa when Litha came rushing in. Storm was up again like there was a spring in the cushion seat.
He knew the instant he looked at her that she'd been successful. She wasn't smiling, but her eyes were burning brightly. He knew.
"We've got a starting point," she said looking around the room. "Siena."
Everybody started talking at once. There was no shortage of questions. The emotion in the room went from gloom to excitement in ten seconds.
After some considerable debate about how to use this information, Elora said the only logical thing to do was to call Monq. It would be around dinnertime at Jefferson Unit and he wouldn't be hard to reach. So they called and put him on speakerphone. Elora told him who was present in the room. After giving the short version of events, with a couple of corrections and interjections, Monq was up to speed.
When asked if he had thoughts about how to proceed, he said that, in this case, magick was the only tool available. Everyone in the room, to a person, turned simultaneously and stared at Litha. She didn't shrink away or begin offering protests or excuses. Instead, she blinked, sighed, and seemed to begin contemplating how she might go about creating a magickal rescue. Watching her face as she accepted the burden of being the only hope, Storm's admiration grew past grudging to full flowering respect. He thought to himself that, in her own strange and feminine way, she was also a knight of The Order. Of sorts.
The Witch's Dream - A Paranormal Romance (The Order of the Black Swan, BOOK TWO) Page 14
