“I… of course I like you,” he said.
“But not in the way I want you to,” she said.
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh? So how is it then?”
“I—”
“I’m funny,” she said, interrupting, “I have a 4.0 GPA, I’m pretty, I’m a Witch, and I’m in to you. What is it about me that you don’t like?”
“It’s not that I don’t like you.”
Natalie cocked an eyebrow. In that gesture, she and Damien were very similar. “Then please tell me what it is, Damien, because I’m tired of trying with you.”
Damien paused, licked his lips, and tried to formulate a sentence in his mind, but the words weren’t coming to him. He searched for Lily’s eyes and held them. All she could do was nod. He didn’t think she knew something he didn’t, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if she did. She was, after all, the telepath here. For all he knew the very walls themselves were speaking into her mind, but he could only hear and react using the senses he owned.
“Look,” he started, “I like you. I do. You are pretty and smart and funny. I just thought, since we were in the same Coven—”
“That’s not fair,” she said, “It just isn’t.”
It wasn’t. Damien knew that much. Natalie had been sweet to him, and she was pretty, intelligent, a Witch. She had said all those things herself just now, only he didn’t need to hear them to know they were true. Natalie was the perfect girl for him, and she had tried hard in the last few weeks. He couldn’t deny that.
But Damien didn’t want to tell her the real reason why he couldn’t give himself in the way she wanted.
The truth was a thing only he and Lily knew. A secret they shared and swore they would take to their graves, for their own protection and for the protection of everyone around them. But all secrets begged to be known. Otherwise how would Damien and Lily have discovered the knowledge that made them want to escape everything they had ever known?
It wasn’t just that, either. There was something else; another truth he didn’t want to part with. The more immediate fear of getting too close to Natalie came from a simple, physical secret; one being kept hostage by his own insecurity and a fear of inadequacy programmed into him by his upbringing.
He was a virgin.
Finally, Damien took Natalie’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t,” she said. “Just tell me the truth, Damien. Tell me the truth and everything will be okay.”
But he wasn’t sure that it would be. How would Natalie be able to accept the truth of what Damien and Lily had done in another life? Telling her could change everything, could tear their Coven apart. And yet, he really was talking to a part of Natalie’s subconscious, making an excuse to not accept her feelings and reciprocate them could have the same effect anyway.
“Natalie,” Lily said, but Natalie didn’t look at her.
Damien looked up. Lily closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and seemed to be reaching out with her mind. He had seen her do Magick often enough that he knew when it was coming. The ripples her Power made in the Currents were always strong; so strong he could almost feel them against his skin.
But here? The Power wasn’t welcome here.
The ceiling split apart with a loud crack. Damien shot up from the sofa and found his sister’s wide eyes full of fear. The Natalie by the window turned, now, scowling, and the Natalie in the kitchen hurled the salad bowl across the room, exploding it into a hundred tiny pieces against a wall.
“That’s not in the rules,” the Natalie on the sofa said, standing. Her voice was coarse now, harsh and raspy. “This is my playground now, and that is not. In. The. Rules.”
Rules? Whose rules?
The entire room started to rumble. Pots and pans fell out of cupboards, a ceramic vase that had been sitting near the front door tumbled to the ground and smashed, and an ill smelling wind came crashing through the window and begun tugging at Natalie’s hair. Everyone’s hair. For an instant, only the barest of instants, Damien felt a trickle of fear worm its way into his heart and his hands started to shake.
“Who are you?” Damien said over the howling of the wind.
“Don’t you remember me?” Natalie said, only it wasn’t her voice, now. The dryness had completely transformed it into something… else. Not quite male, not quite female, and not quite human. But there was something familiar to the voice; it was like an old song he was hearing again for the first time in years.
“Damien!” Lily said.
Natalie whipped around. “Lilith,” she said, “It’s so nice to see you again after all this time.”
“Lily, we have to go,” Damien said, “We have to get out now.”
“Go?” Natalie asked, “But you just got here, and you were about to get to the good part of the story.”
“You need to leave,” Lily said to the thing that wasn’t Natalie, “You didn’t want her.”
“That’s right. I wanted him. But beggars can’t be choosers, right?” Natalie laughed a raspy laugh.
Another crack accompanied Natalie’s laughs, only this time the crack seemed to stretch on and on, and when Damien looked up he saw fingers of black lines appearing on the ceiling and walls, stretching and reaching for each other. Bits of wood and masonry began to fall as the cracks spread across the ceiling, and Damien knew it was time to get out.
He yelled for his sister to follow and made for the door. The Natalie in the kitchen made a swipe for him with a kitchen knife but he ducked under it and pushed her aside. Lily broke around the sofa but the Natalie at the window grabbed her arm and yanked her hard. With a hard tug she managed to wrench herself free, but sofa Natalie was in her path, and she had no way to reach Damien.
“Go!” she said, “I’ll find you!”
Damien didn’t have a choice. The next thing he knew, he was running. Only he wasn’t dashing down the hall of a building as he would have expected. He was on a wide, empty street; Market Street, he figured. The mist was everywhere, choking everything, but he could still see where he was going.
Down Market Street he went. Then, somehow, he was flying along Lombard Street, and then he was sprinting by the bay, past the piers, up a hill then down another. He was anywhere and everywhere and nowhere. Chased. Hunted. Terrified. And when he finally found a place to rest and catch his breath, along a rocky shore just west of the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew.
He was alone too.
CHAPTER 6
That wasn’t Natalie.
She may have looked, talked, and moved like Natalie, but it wasn’t her. It was that thing, whatever entity had been meant for Damien, that he had spoken to and interacted with. And it knew who he was. It knew who Lily was.
Shit. Lily.
His hands were trembling. The one clamped around the Amber gemstone was starting to hurt from how tightly he was holding onto it. As Damien cast his gaze over the San Francisco bay, looking up from below at a bruised sky zooming by like a time-lapse shot, all he could think about was how he had run out and left Lily there.
Some of the clouds even started to look like her after a time.
Was she okay? Had she managed to get away from… whatever that thing was? Was she looking for him? Damien wasn’t a clairvoyant or a diviner; he couldn’t see into the past, the present, or the future, and wasn’t very good at throwing his senses into the Nether to glimpse the invisible world for clues that might help him solve a problem. Not that he thought he could even reach the Nether from inside Natalie’s mind.
He allowed himself a moment to breathe and relax, because what else could he do? When he found a rock he liked—a task that seemed to take three hours—he sat down, crossed his legs, and placed the Amber carefully on his knee. Here, whatever here was, the stone really did look like a flame trapped in a stone.
The golden, orange light flickered and danced within the confines of the soft, smooth gem. Lazy fingers of fire
stroked the edges of the cage that contained them, enticing, requesting, searching for a way out. But he couldn’t release them. This was Lily’s beacon. She would need it if she was going to find him, and he needed finding now more than ever. Without her he had no idea how he was going to find Natalie; never mind wake up.
If he even could.
“Ahoy!” called a voice from out at sea.
Damien looked up and saw a small fishing ship, drifting lazily a few hundred feet from where he was sitting. There was a man in the cabin of the small fishing ship; he was wearing a yellow overcoat, a hat, had a long white beard, and he was waving at the shore. After looking around and finding no one, Damien decided that the man was talking to him.
“Ahoy,” Damien said, loud enough for the man on the ship to hear.
“Where are you headed, boy?”
“I’m… not heading anywhere. Just sitting on this rock.”
“Well, if you need to be getting somewhere, I’m pulling up to port just down there.”
Was this another trick? “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The man went back to controlling his boat and, as he had said a moment ago, pulled it in to a wooden dock not far from where Damien was sitting. He remembered these rocks as the ones where he had met Natalie earlier on, but where he was looking now there was an old fishing village in place of a modern car-park and the Beach Bistro Café.
Gulls encircled it, searching for any morsel they could find, while big burly men hauled boxes full of fish and supplies from one side of the dock to the other. The cars parked nearby were still modern, but everything else—the small warehouses, the ditty the workmen were singing, and the clamor of bells and gulls—had a kind of ancient feel to it. Not just old, but ancient. As if these men had been fishing here and hauling boxes since the beginning of time.
In what seemed like half a heartbeat, Damien was walking toward the fishing village. He couldn’t remember having gotten off the rock he had been sitting on, but he guessed he must have. The dizzying effects of this dreamlike world were starting to take their toll in the form of a pinching headache dully stabbing at his left temple, but it wasn’t enough to bother him much.
Careful not to touch anything or disturb anyone, he navigated his way through the tangle of boxes, tackle, and live flopping fish until he reached a ticket booth. There was a sign posted on top of the little wooden box, but he couldn’t read it. In fact, he barely even registered it. He just assumed one was there and somehow knew what the box was. Inside the booth there was a woman, aging and haggard, but still youthful in her own right.
It was the eyes.
She had Natalie’s deep brown pools.
These truths weren’t immediately apparent with his five senses, though. The woman looked nothing like Natalie, and yet somehow Damien felt a little bit of the witch in her. Much like in dreams where one person doesn’t look, talk, or act like the person they remind you of. You just know.
“How many?” she asked.
“One please,” Damien said.
“Where ya’ headed?”
“I… uh…”
“Alcatraz is nice this time of year.”
“Alcatraz?”
The old woman cocked an eyebrow, picked a cigarette from an ash tray Damien hadn’t seen until now, and took a long, hard drag. “Yes, Alcatraz. That place there.”
Damien looked, and there it was. The island prison looked somehow bigger than it was in real life. Or maybe he was just closer to it on this side of the bay. Or maybe the island had moved since the last time he had looked at it. Anything was possible here, he was starting to learn. Anything and everything.
Everything is symbols and metaphors, Lily had told him.
Then it dawned on him.
Alcatraz is a prison. Something, or someone, is stopping Natalie from waking up. But that something or someone may need a metaphorical place to keep Natalie’s consciousness locked up, wouldn’t it? Magick had laws it had to follow, entities had conditions that governed their abilities, and this place had rules too. He didn’t know what they were, but they were there all the same.
So if an entity was keeping Natalie’s consciousness locked up inside her own mind, what better place than Alcatraz? A place she had grown up within line of sight of. Fuck, of course! Of course!
“Fasho,” he said, “One ticket to Alcatraz.”
There was that word again; the same word Natalie had said to the waitress at the Bistro. It was another way of saying yes in the San Francisco bay. The surprise wasn’t that he remembered it, but that he said it like it came naturally to him.
“Good looks,” the woman said, and she grabbed a ticket and slid it through the window hole.
“How much?” Damien asked.
“Nothing for you, sweetheart. You’ve earned this one.”
His eyes narrowed, suspiciously. What if this was another trick? “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m just a friend of the West.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The West can hear you even from in here, Damien,” she said. “You have friends, child.”
With a nod she gestured over Damien’s shoulder. He spun around and saw the Captain of the fishing boat, smiling and waving him over. On the wind he could smell the brine and the salt and the fish, could hear the steady lapping of waves on wood and rock, the gulls calling from above, could see the magnificence of the ocean stretching out across the bay, beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and into forever.
All around him was the very presence of the Guardian of the West. It was there now, had always been there, and would always be there. A friend of the West; a friend of Damien’s. This is why I’ve ended up here, he thought. In a place as alien as the inside of Natalie’s mind he was safest close to the ocean, close to his element, and to his guardian. Magick wasn’t only a conscious art; the Currents were eternally pushing and pulling against each other. When a Witch reached into them to do Magick he could change them at his will, but when he wasn’t using Magick they would guide him along.
And Magick is what had brought him here.
He thanked the woman in the booth and made tracks across the dock toward the waiting boat. The Captain greeted him, helped him aboard, and escorted him to the prow of the ship.
“This is where you’ll be getting the best view,” he said, “The bay is a beautiful place.”
Damien nodded. “Thanks,” he said, “Really.”
“It’s no bother. I was heading there anyway.”
“You were?”
“Aye. I catch some of the best crabs around those rocks.”
He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he wasn’t about to argue with a dream-fisherman. Whether he truly was a piece of an almost Godlike being stuffed into a skin Damien’s mind could comprehend, or simply the figment of an unconscious woman’s mind—or both—it didn’t much matter. Damien was moving again, and moving was better than sitting on a rock and waiting. How much time had passed outside? An hour? Two? A day? Was the headache an indicator of how his body was doing without sustenance?
The Captain called for the dockhands to remove the ship’s moorings. All at once, three men approached the side of the fishing boat and untied huge, heavy ropes, freeing the ship from the dock. The engine grumbled to life, choking and gargling for a few moments before steadying into a whirr that started to gently propel the boat along the bay.
In moments, the ship was cutting across the water like a speedboat.
A strong gust, pregnant with the smell of the sea, was rushing by, tugging at Damien’s scarf and his coat and causing the American flag on the ship’s stern to snap wildly.
“I didn’t know this ship could go that fast!” he yelled at the captain.
From behind the main window to the cabin the Captain smiled a crooked smile. “I’m giving her all she’s got,” he said, “Just for you, lad. To get you where you need to go before the fire comes.”
The smile on Damien’s face faded away as if the sun
had just slid behind a cloud. “Fire?” he asked. “What fire?”
The Captain started to speak, but Damien was having trouble hearing him over the gushing wind. He stepped away from the prow, crossed the deck, and went around the square cabin to find the door only to realize that there was none.
“Hey,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the window and screaming into the glass. “Don’t you have a door?”
The Captain shook his head. “Nope. Don’t need one.”
“What? How is that even possible?”
The old fisherman craned his neck around, smiled, and said “Because I am the ship, boy.”
His warm, old face didn’t seem threatening, but a strange dread was coming all the same; prowling toward him like a dark shadow just below the surface of the water. He spun around, searching for signs of a fire that could damage the ship he was on, but found none. And even if a fire had broken out on the deck of the ship, the fire-extinguisher clamped to the side of the cabin would have made short work of it.
He tapped on the window again and asked, for a second time, “What fire?”
“The demon’s breath, Damien,” said the old Captain, pointing, “The dark fire.”
When he turned around, he saw what the Captain was pointing at.
CHAPTER 7
It was a beast. To have given it another name wouldn’t have done justice to the thing approaching—no, advancing like an implacable tide—from across the other side of the bay. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, or maybe it had been there all along. There was no way to know in this dream world. But it was there now, mighty and terrifying.
Damien stared, wide-eyed and frozen, as the hulking mass of rolling black smoke tumbled over the Golden Gate Bridge and swallowed it whole. From within the cloud flashes of green could be seen, pulsing violently and erratically and making strange and terrifying shapes behind the cloud. A deep, grumbling roar followed its advance accompanied by the crackling of lightning whipping wildly in green arcs all about, striking the water and everything in its path like an angry child in the midst of a tantrum.
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