by Ashley McLeo
“Now then,” Noro turned, flung his arms out wide and raised his voice so all could hear, "Witches.”
Half of the circle stepped forward.
Evelyn studied the woman to her right and wondered what she was. If Empusa and Amon were any indication, this hunch-backed and pock-faced woman was not a vampire. She sighed. Even if I escape, I’ll have to fight off witches, vampires, and who knows what else? I wish we’d spent more time learning about the greater magical world. Even as she thought the words, she knew they were unfair. Brigit and her aunts had worked them nearly to death, cramming twenty-one years of magical education and self-defense into three months. Evelyn knew the next logical step would have been a crash course in creatures, especially after Alexandria. Why didn’t I go back? None of this would have happened . . .
“Lift the enchantments on the manor,” Noro instructed.
Evelyn’s eyes widened and she blinked.
“The entire manor, Master?” a man with a long white beard asked.
“That was my order.”
“But what if she escapes?”
“How do you expect Eve to create a portal from this house, through space, and to the motherland, if her magic is bound to this room?” Noro’s voice boomed in the cavernous space. “She shall be under my watch. Now do as I command, half-breed!”
The man cringed and hunched his shoulders like a beaten dog.
Half-breed, is it? Am I seeing the truth of a fata led world for the first time? How did Noro get these people to follow him if he treats them this way?
A sea of words flew up around her as witches undid their spells. Most used wands, whereas Nora and a couple others performed magic with only their hands, as the McKays did. Evelyn listened carefully, and though she did not understand everything, she found she recognized about half. Good, if I can just remember how to counter all of those spells then I have a chance at escape later.
“It is done, Master,” Nora’s tone was eager to please.
Noro nodded at her, and she blushed.
Evelyn rolled her eyes. Oh, how disgusting.
“My dearest Eve, it is time to do as we discussed earlier. Remember, you must bend space-time in on itself. To do so will take a true hollowing of yourself. Do not fear for your own well-being. I have Amon waiting to donate blood. His blood, a derivative of my own, powerful, immortal essence, will keep you alive. Give this everything you have. I shall know if you do not.”
Well crap, Evelyn racked her brain. How Noro wanted her to do something she’d never done, no witch had ever done, was beyond her. She stood in the middle of the circle with two dozen pairs of probing eyes on her. Evelyn shuddered and closed her eyes.
Bending space-time in on itself, Evelyn thought, hoping that simply thinking the words enough would bring an epiphany. Space time, bending, hollowing herself, hedgecrossing . . . what does it all mean? She huffed a breath of air through her nose. Start with baby steps. Maybe astral travel will miraculously work this time. I mean, it can’t be any worse than all that weird fata magic shit Noro wanted me to do earlier.
Expecting nothing to happen as it had every other time, she thought the spell for astral travel. Caeliter.
Her magic electrified her fingertips and Evelyn’s lips curved up. Then she jumped a foot high as something thumped hard against her chest.
“A half-hearted attempt,” Nora sneered. “She’s only using the spell we taught her. If astral travel was the answer, the fata would have been here long ago.”
Evelyn scowled and pushed Nora from her mind. She hadn’t even noticed the witch was there, but then Nora had always been a skilled sneak. Once Evelyn was alone in her mind once more she considered the situation. It may have been half-hearted, but something actually happened, Evelyn marveled. Wait, doesn’t Aoife always lie down when she travels? I should look like I’m making every possible effort.
“I need to lie down,” Evelyn said staring into Noro’s black eyes and ignoring the guffaws and snickers that arose from his minions.
Noro nodded, and the sniggers ceased.
Evelyn lowered herself to the floor, trying not to think of the kitten that had died there. Concentrate, Evelyn, concentrate. You’ll have even less room to negotiate if you don’t give him something.
Closing her eyes, Evelyn envisioned her soul floating above her body. A vague feeling of déjà vu came over her, as if somehow, somewhere, part of her had done this before.
“Caeliter,” she whispered.
She gasped as something within her pushed hard against the confines of her skin and a sapphire blue light burst out of her hands to hover above her. Her heart raced in her chest. Did it work? Is that my soul? But Aoife said she could never think inside her body without her soul. Why is it just floating there?
The blue light shimmered high above her but made no move to go further.
Maybe it needs instructions. You’re supposed to go to The Crystal Palace, Evelyn pushed the thought out.
Suddenly, the blue light formed arms that reached out toward Evelyn.
Evelyn blinked.
Noro swooped down close to her. He too seemed unable to take his eyes off the blue light. “Tell her where she must go and give her a piece of you so she can find her way back.”
Give the freaking light a piece of me? Like a toenail?
The blue light shook from side to side, and her stubby arms touched the top of her.
You want a piece of my head?
The sapphire light moved up and down.
That thing just wants me to toss a piece of my . . . Oh! A memory of Evelyn’s first ceremens lesson surfaced.
“Toss your mind out like a fishing line and wait for it to catch on another’s mind,” Morgane, their crazy octogenarian teacher, had instructed months ago.
Evelyn’s heart seized as she realized what she had to do. I have to separate my mind like Aoife does. My soul is going to catch it and take it with her through space. I have to give her instructions when I toss it. Well, this should be interesting. And before Evelyn could talk herself out of it, she closed her eyes. She imagined herself wrapping up the words “The Crystal Palace” in paper so they stayed together and threw the words toward the shimmering light, attached to a bit of her mind.
And then, Evelyn saw massive rocks hurling past her in her mind’s eye. She dodged and whirled around them, gleeful for the familiar feeling freedom of flight. Turning, she saw a circle with rings around it and waved.
Evelyn sucked in a breath and gripped the floor. Sweat began pouring from her forehead. I like flying? No, not me . . . My soul likes flying. And was that freaking Saturn? She kept her eyes closed for fear of losing sight of what she was seeing in the portion of her mind her soul carried with it. Or worse, losing her soul.
Noro moved closer to Evelyn. “It’s working,” he whispered, millimeters from her ear so that only she could hear. “You’re no longer part fata. I sense only your witch’s soul still inside you. Your pneuma, your pure fata soul hidden beneath the mire of human flesh and blood, is seeking its home.”
MY PNEUMA! Holy hell that’s what he was always gabbing on about, saying I was part fata. So I have a pneuma—a freaking fata soul living inside me—and now it’s in outer space. My witch soul is still with me so I can think and feel the room I’m in. Despite the insanity of this idea, Evelyn forced her mind to quiet so she could focus on following her pneuma’s procession through space.
It was the strangest sensation. Sensing the rough, uneven stone against her flesh and a trickle of stardust that brushed her pneuma’s cheeks at the same time. Through her pneuma’s eyes, Evelyn moved faster than she ever had bodily, covering thousands of miles in seconds. She looked up in time to see Pluto zoom by. In no more than a minute she was farther than any man had ever traveled, in a different galaxy, or as far as she knew, none at all.
Evelyn felt a faint pressure on her chest as her pneuma pulled closer the words Evelyn had wrapped up and tossed to her. Her pneuma glanced at the package against her
chest and Evelyn saw that what she had envisioned as a plain brown paper package containing the words “The Crystal Palace” was actually a glowing silver ball. Evelyn examined the ball through her pneuma’s eyes and realized the ball was growing larger the farther her pneuma flew. What the hell?
As if she’d heard Evelyn’s question, her pneuma glanced behind her and Evelyn’s heart stopped. A string, glittering with the brilliance of a thousand stars, was attached to the ball. It was like a ball of yarn except as the string lengthened behind her pneuma, the ball grew larger, not smaller. Evelyn’s mouth fell open as she witnessed the sparkling string opening into a void in space as it trailed her shimmering blue pneuma.
Holy shit. That string is space-time. My pneuma is pulling space-time in on itself and winding it into the package of words I gave her as she flies! This is insane! A sudden stab of fear overcame her excitement. I hope she can make it back. Will I go crazy if she doesn’t? She has a portion of my mind.
Evelyn gripped the ground beneath her so that her nails broke against the stone as her pneuma nearly collided with an asteroid and brought her attention back to the moment.
Now I know how Aoife felt when she had to split her consciousness to show us our birth. It’s enough to drive a person mad, having two minds, two inputs of sensation, all at once. She let out an exhale and inhaled slowly, trying to calm her racing heart. A constricted stream of air passed through her nostrils and into her lungs. Breathing was growing more difficult the further her pneuma traveled from her body.
“There it is!” Noro shrieked in glee.
The surrounding witches gasped and shuffled their feet in excitement.
Evelyn’s eyes popped open.
A hole, blacker than the blackest black and no larger than a doughnut, hovered at the end of her feet in the dark cellar room.
“Make it larger,” Noro instructed.
But Evelyn no longer needed Noro’s instruction. Her pneuma was in charge now.
Her pneuma flew faster, past stunning celestial bodies Evelyn could not name and entire fields of asteroids. Evelyn’s human eyes remained trained on the black hole before her, now the size of a kiddie pool. How big will it get? Is the basement large enough to accommodate it? A vision of Noro, Empusa, Amon, and Nora disappearing through the black hole swam up, and she nearly smiled. Well, that wouldn’t be so bad.
And then, a red planet was upon her in her mind’s eye, only seconds away. An alien spring of happiness arose in Evelyn. Her pneuma was celebrating, far away in space.
She’s found Hecate.
Dark red mountains and forests came into focus through her pneuma’s eyes. It was a strangely familiar and totally alien sight. Her pneuma raced through the bulbous trees with square leaves the size of car windshields and flew over a canyon hundreds of miles wide.
Evelyn watched as if on a split screen, her pneuma shooting through a wooded area and the hole in the basement growing ever larger and closer to Evelyn’s feet. I hope she finds The Crystal Palace soon. I don’t think I’ll survive slipping into that hole after her.
A second later a glittering brilliance filled the dark basement, blinding everyone in it.
Evelyn blinked rapidly and focused on her labored inhales and exhales as she stared into the black hole in amazement. There in the center of the black hole was a palace, shining bright in the distance and growing larger with every second.
In no time at all her pneuma was at the palace gates and up the steps. For the first time since leaving Earth, her pneuma paused.
A wheezy gasp escaped Evelyn’s lips. The Crystal Palace was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, honed of diamond-liked stones with smaller colored gems resembling rubies, emeralds, and sapphires bordering the large windows and doors. Light shone through the stones creating a prismatic rainbow effect on every surface. Before she had time to take it all in, Evelyn was on the move once more as her pneuma opened the heavy palace door and zoomed down the hallway, slower than she flew in space, but still fast.
Evelyn was grateful for her pneuma’s speed. As much as she would have liked to stare at the palace in wonder, she was fighting for every breath she took. Is my pneuma sensitive to what I feel? Or is she just happy to be home and rushing? What the—holy hell! Evelyn’s gut dropped to her feet as two large doors at the end of a long hallway flew open at her pneuma’s approach.
Thousands of fata floated before her.
The fata in the crowd murmured in an unintelligible language as they caught sight of Evelyn’s pneuma. Fata parted, creating an aisle for her to pass. Evelyn’s pneuma locked eyes with a fuchsia fata whose gaze flowed down her pneuma’s sapphire body to the blackness, the thread of space-time, that trailed Evelyn’s pneuma like a never-ending blanket. The fuchsia fata met Evelyn’s pneuma’s eyes once more and Evelyn thought it looked hesitant, scared even.
Dimia was easy to spot due to his positioning in the room, though he looked nothing like Noro had described. Flat white, with a faint shimmer of gold around his dark eyes, he resembled a ghost well past his prime. The fata king’s eyes locked on Evelyn’s brilliant sapphire pneuma and he rose from his throne.
“Come, daughter,” Dimia instructed.
Dimia speaks English? Well, I guess Noro has been on Earth long enough to teach him . . .
Evelyn’s pneuma floated forward, clutching the words that led her here now wrapped in layers of glittering strings of space-time.
“I always knew you would come. My most loyal daughter. I see the portal trails behind you. Will you not open it and let your people join you? We have waited a long time.”
Evelyn closed her eyes, trying to block out the whispers of onlookers and concentrate on her obstructed breathing. Noro’s panting was particularly distracting.
Why is he panting? He doesn’t even breathe, Evelyn wondered with a stab of envy over Noro’s heavy breaths.
“Set your parcel down,” Dimia instructed, gesturing to the ball and string Evelyn’s pneuma carried.
Her pneuma set the ball of words wrapped in space-time upon the glittering floor. The words and string her pneuma had carried for light-years opened into a tunnel, a portal connecting Hecate and Earth.
The instant the portal opened on Hecate, Evelyn let out a blood-curdling scream, expelling what little air was left in her lungs. Her body pulled into a tight ball. Her head pounded in agony. No. NO! Evelyn attempted to draw in a breath and received only a small, merciful sip.
She yearned for her pneuma and her bit of missing mind almost as much as air. The act of her pneuma setting down her bundle of words and opening the portal had made one thing clear. The bit of her mind Evelyn had tossed out and the words her pneuma carried through space were still attached to each other. Both now rested on the floor of a palace in Hecate. Evelyn’s mind was now on two planets at once and dangerously close to snapping.
She needs to pick the package back up. We need to be touching through my mind or else my mind will break, Evelyn realized with terror.
Come back, Evelyn commanded.
But, as Evelyn saw through the black hole, her pneuma had eyes only for Dimia, who was making sweeping proclamations a galaxy away. “This is the moment we have been waiting for, dear subjects. Follow me to our new home, Earth! A home where we will once again become powerful.” With that, Dimia leapt into the void.
Now! He’s through. Pick it up now! Come back! Evelyn shouted, hoping the half of her mind laying on the floor of the Crystal Palace would project her thought to her pneuma, as a sensation of a thousand knives plunging into her skull washed over her.
This time, her pneuma looked around as if bewildered.
A rainbow of fata approached the void and two dozen followed their king without ceremony.
Pick up the words and leave. Or I’ll die. You won’t have a body to come back to. Only as Evelyn said the words did she register the choppiness of the voice in her head and how her vision had dimmed.
Her entire body trembled against the cold stone as Evel
yn drew in another tiny sip of air. She would pass out from lack of oxygen soon if something didn’t change. Her eyes trained on the black portal before her and an idea appeared from its depths. She knew it might cause her to pass out and likely die right then and there if she used too much magical energy. But it’s my best hope. I have to get her attention.
Using only as much magic as she dared, Evelyn called forth a stream of air and molded it into a ball the size of a golf ball above her prone body. She cupped the ball in her shaking hands and brought it to her lips.
“Come back. I’m dying,” she whispered into the ball.
And then, she hurled the ball through the portal.
Her arm hit the ground with a thunk and Evelyn lay there, waiting, hoping, sure if the ball didn’t get through in time or her pneuma came back too slowly, those would be her last words.
A small reassurance came seconds later when Evelyn heard her own voice trumpet forth, out of the black portal on Hecate and vibrate off the palace’s jeweled walls. The crowd of fata around her pneuma paused and stared down at the black hole in wonder.
Evelyn waited, breath tight in her chest to see what her pneuma would do. Come on, pick it up and leave!
A heartbeat later Evelyn forced out an exhale as her pneuma sprang into action, picking up the word bundle and string and disappearing the way she came.
The portal followed, sealing itself in her pneuma’s wake.
Shouts in an alien tongue arose as a stampede of fata followed Evelyn’s pneuma through the halls and out the doors. But they were weak from millennia of living on a dying planet, and Evelyn’s pneuma escaped them with ease, clutching her package of words to her body as she fled.
The sapphire pneuma flew at a dizzying pace over mountains and canyons as she retraced her exact path and launched herself back into space. She flew without marvel or awe past planets humans had yet to discover, racing back home to where Evelyn’s body lay.
Vaguely, Evelyn felt the ghostly impression of the package her pneuma clutched grow smaller as the string of space-time unraveled and the portal closed in her pneuma’s wake.
