You couldn’t call it a force of nature. Nature doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t want. But this thing wanted, felt, and thought. Damien had seen it before; he had watched his own mother and father participate in its conjuring, witnessed the High Magus bring it forth into the world, and heard the cries of fear and pain from those it touched.
Some called it the demon’s breath, others insisted it was a demon made manifest, but most simply called it the Dark Fire; claiming that it was not the essence of one demon, but hundreds and thousands. He thought he would never have to see it again, never subject his mind to the maddening sight of it, and yet here it was; advancing like some terrible titan of myth.
And it was gaining on them.
“We need to go faster!” Damien said.
“This is as fast as she’ll go, boy,” said the Captain. “Unless you want to throw yourself overboard and give her a little less weight to pull, ey?” He cackled and went back to steering the ship as it flew toward Alcatraz.
Alcatraz.
There he would be safe. Those walls were designed to keep people in, but if he could only get there he was sure they would be able to keep it out. And Natalie would be there, he knew. Once he got to her he could wake her up and take her out. The Dark Fire wouldn’t be able to touch either of them once they were awake.
Damien rushed to the front of the ship and watched the world fly by. The storm was gaining. Fast. It had already consumed the bridge and half of San Francisco along with it by the time he looked back. Skyscrapers were starting to disappear now as fingers of smoke, black as pitch, wormed their way through the gaps and pulled them in to the cloud. When he turned to face the tiny island prison again he found it sitting where it had been a moment ago, directly ahead, but that was the problem.
It was still exactly where it had been a moment ago. Despite the wind in his hair, the spray of the water, and the grumble of the engines, the boat didn’t seem like it had closed any distance between it and the island in the last couple of seconds. In fact, it seemed like it was moving backwards!
“What’s happening?” Damien said to the Captain, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“We’re not going to make it, boy!” the captain said. “You’re going to have to jump.”
“Jump?”
“Aye. Jump if you want to get to the girl.”
Damien looked into the water at the head of the ship. It seemed still, somehow, but the distance between the ship and the prison was great and he wasn’t the best of swimmers. He was sure he could reach it. Sure he could. But the smoke would get to him first, wouldn’t it?
He rubbed the Amber in his hand with his finger and enjoyed the comforting warmth it gave him. When he closed his eyes he thought of Lily and remembered how happy they had both been that night when they escaped the Compound, when they put their old life in the rear-view.
Then a hand reached for his and clasped it tightly.
“Hi,” Lily said, smiling. She was on the ship with him now, and in that moment he couldn’t remember whether she had been on the ship with him all along or if she had just arrived, but it didn’t matter. A pure, raw happiness surged through him at the sight of his sister and he threw his arms around her.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. Emotions were coming now, like a well filling up almost to the point of spilling over. He didn’t know where they came from, only that they were there and they felt… urgent.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, “I’ve always been here. And I’ll always be here.”
Damien pulled away and smiled. When he looked over his shoulder, the Dark Fire seemed to have stopped moving. It was still there, clinging to the city and the bay, black smoke crackling with green light, but it was still; like a storm seen from a distance.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“I do,” she said, “I wished so hard for you to never have to see that again. Lot of good that did us.”
“It doesn’t matter. Look, it’s stopped.”
“Just like it did for us that night.”
“It’ll start again soon, won’t it?”
Lily nodded. “That’s why we have to go now.”
He craned his head around and found Alcatraz, now, rising up in front of the ship. Up ahead was a tiny wooden port, and the Captain was headed for it at a slow pace. It seemed like the port hadn’t been used in a long while, but there was another boat next to it; an inflatable RHIB much like the one Damien’s uncle used to take out to sea when he was a boy.
His heart caught in his throat. Lily’s hand tightened around his.
“It’s going to be okay,” Lily said, “Whatever this is, we can deal with it.”
“You don’t think he… he’s really responsible?”
“I don’t know. Could be that our own memories are mixing with Natalie’s, or that whatever’s keeping her down somehow knows what we’re thinking.”
Or who we are, Damien thought. But he didn’t say it aloud. The resting speedboat looked pretty conspicuous, and the likeness to his uncle’s down to the camo print and the silver duct-tape patch from when he came in to the port a little too hard one Sunday afternoon and ripped the hell out of the rubber. Could his uncle have been that man in the alley, or was Lily right? Was this all just… imagination?
When the Captain brought the ship to a halt he appeared on the outside of the cabin, despite the lack of a door, and went about the process of tying the ship to one of the sturdy wooden beams jutting out of the water. With the boat securely in place, he lowered the walkway onto the wooden harbor and stood aside.
“This is your stop,” he said.
They approached, thanked him, and stepped off the ship. When Damien turned and saw that the Captain wasn’t immediately untying the boat, he asked, “Will you wait for us?”
The Captain smiled a bearded smile. “The West is at your service even in here, Master Colt.”
Damien felt a tingle of excitement rush through him and nodded. “Thank you.”
“Your thanks are welcome. But you should hurry. Storm’s coming.”
Lily tugged on Damien’s hand and together they proceeded up the stony path leading from the harbor to the prison. It loomed over them now like some monolithic thing; a tall, patchy building, worn with age and battered by salt and wind, with bars on the windows, rusting guard towers, and paint peeling off the walls like scabs falling away to reveal black, clotted blood beneath.
The sight of it gave Damien the chills, but he didn’t falter.
When they arrived at the outer fence, they weren’t entirely surprised to find it open. Mocking them. Daring them to enter. And so they did. If this was a trap they had already fallen into it, so what use was there in playing it safe? Whatever entity was coiled around Natalie’s soul like a boa constrictor wanted Damien, not Natalie.
She was a bystander, an innocent. Her only crime had been the desire to be near Damien. He would never forgive himself she had been dealt any kind of lasting damage by this thing that had attacked her, and he would do anything to get her out of this nightmare. Give anything. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, it would be hers.
Even if that meant his life.
CHAPTER 8
“The dimensions in here are off,” Damien said to Lily.
Having never before set foot within the massive concrete enclosure that was Alcatraz, Damien didn’t have any idea what the place actually looked like inside. He had seen pictures, sure, but images never gave anyone a real sense of the whole. You couldn’t smell the dampness through a picture, couldn’t feel the cold of the walls, and couldn’t hear your own footsteps echoing all the way up to a ceiling that seemed impossibly high.
For a prison, this one had been all too easy to get into. First there was a chain link fence; it was ajar. Then they had crossed through a huge vault door, which they had also found ajar. He had expected they would emerge in a reception area flanked on all sides by offices, water coolers, and vending machines. But they
had, it seemed, gone right into a cell-block which was a great deal smaller than he would have expected.
“You’re not kidding,” Lily said. Her echo agreed.
She was walking along a long row of ground floor cells. Most were empty and many of them reeked of piss and shit and sweat. Some had small tables with little trinkets on them; candles, photographs, and books. Lily even pointed out one book that was open, a candle flickering gently by its side.
“Was someone just reading that?” she asked.
“If someone was, where is he now?”
Lily shook her head and moved on to the next cell, but the instant she looked into it she recoiled, slapped her hand to her mouth and turned away from it. When Damien saw what was inside, turning away was all he could do to prevent his stomach from emptying all over the concrete floor.
“Oh my God,” Lily said, fighting the urge to wretch.
His heart had started to beat fast and hard against his chest, but he turned to look at the cell all the same and took it in.
First were the flies. They were everywhere, hovering, buzzing, and multiplying. And where there weren’t flies there were maggots, crawling and tumbling all over each other. Then, of course, was the smell; a gag-inducing stench so completely overpowering, Damien wondered if it would persist even after he woke from his Astral Dream.
And then there was the blood. It looked as though someone had emptied an eighteen wheeler full of pig’s blood and guts into the cell. Black and syrupy, it was dripping from the bars, bedposts, and light fixtures in large dollops. Bits of flesh, brain, intestines, livers, hearts and lungs—all but unrecognizable individually—were scattered around like discarded toys.
The worst part was it all seemed so senseless.
Why show me this, he thought. To frighten him, no doubt; to throw his mental fortitude a curve-ball and send it reeling. That showed intelligence. This thing wasn’t about to take it lying down, it was clever and crafty, and capable. Damien didn’t want to admit it, but the grim tableau had jarred him a little. Despite the dreamlike state he was in, most of the time he had spent here had been as real to him as the world he had just come from, save for a few small oddities. He would not be able to simply pinch himself awake. The fear he was feeling was his to carry now, and while it certainly didn’t help his psyche it did mean one thing.
They were getting closer.
“Are you alright?” he asked Lily.
Lily nodded. She had her hand over her mouth but she dropped it now. “Yeah I just… I wasn’t ready for that.”
Damien nodded. “We just have to be on our toes.”
“I will be. I’m sorry. I was just lost in thought.”
They continued down the hall, not once stopping to look back at the gruesome scene in the cell they had just passed. But he could still hear the blood slopping off the bars and splatting against the ground now and again. The mental image caused him to shudder.
“What were you thinking about?” Damien asked, trying to direct his mind away from what he had just seen.
“The compound,” Lily said.
The Compound, Damien thought, another reason to shudder. “You shouldn’t be thinking about it.”
“I can’t help it. Everything that’s happened… how did they even find us?”
“We don’t know that they found us.”
“You really think this has nothing to do with them?”
He did. His family had to have been involved. If not, who else? Damien shook his head.
“They found us, Damien. I don’t know how, but they found us.”
“We always knew they would come back one day. Uncle Brian and Aunt Clara weren’t the kind of people to leave things alone.”
Though not blood related, back in Oregon Damien and Lily used to live in, everyone who wasn’t blood was an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin. The High Magus, Brian, had been Uncle Brian growing up. Besides having a slight temper problem and a need to instill discipline in his kids like they were soldiers in his platoon, Damien hadn’t ever been given a reason not to like him.
Until the night he decided Lily would marry his son Henry.
That was the thing about the Compound. The High Magus and his council ran things and took care of the big decisions “for the good of all”. Oftentimes those decisions ranged from the trivial—whose turn is it to milk the cows?—to the grand—who is going to marry, and have a child with, who? Unless you were on the Council you didn’t get a say, and even then the final decision still fell on the High Magus’ shoulders. Damien’s family didn’t particularly have a lot of clout, so when the Magus decided to wed his son to Lily, the Colts chose not to question it.
After all, it meant prosperity for the family and future grandchildren.
Damien hadn’t fully come into his heritage as a Witch then, but he had witch-dreams often enough. Prophetic ones. And Lily had learned to trust them when no one else would give him the time of day. So when Damien dreamt of her wedding to Henry ending in blood and pain, Lily didn’t dismiss him. She had always disliked the know-it-all, crow-faced boy anyway and had no intention of marrying him.
Considering what happened on the night they made their escape from that dreadful place, it wouldn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to believe the High Magus had followed them all the way down from Oregon to enact his revenge. Only he hadn’t hit Damien with his hex as he had intended to; he had hit Natalie. An innocent.
Damien’s stomach twisted into a knot and his heart… it felt like someone had squeezed it.
“Are you alright?” Lily asked. She had noticed.
“Yeah,” he said, “It’s just now you’ve got me thinking.”
“This wasn’t your fault,” she said, “None of this was your fault.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“And I’m going to repeat it forever. What happened tonight couldn’t have been avoided. He would have found you wherever you were.”
“I just hate that this happened to her.”
“I know. I do too. Natalie was—is—such an awesome, sweet girl.”
She is, Damien thought. And for the first time since they had met, the thought of exploring the curve of Natalie’s cheek and the shape of her lips with his fingertips, of holding hands at the park and sharing a hot dog, of watching a movie together on the sofa, none of it felt like something to stay away from. In fact, he would have given anything to be back at the apartment right now, sitting with Natalie at his side.
Natalie and her honey and cinnamon scent.
Damien stopped. Sniffed. Looked.
“What is it?” Lily asked.
“Can you smell that?”
“The blood? No. Thank the Gods.”
“No, not that.”
Damien spun around in a three-sixty degree arc and tried to get a better lock on the smell. It was strongest in the direction of an open hallway, so strong in fact that if he hadn’t known what he was looking at was a cell-block he would have mistaken it for a bakery. Which cell-block it was, though, he didn’t know. He couldn’t read the lettering or understand the number written on the wall next to the door.
Fucking dreams, he thought.
“She’s there,” he said, “Right down there. I can smell her.”
“You can smell her?” Lily asked, sniffing. Then she caught the scent, and her eyes widened. “Holy hell!”
Damien started to rush across the cell-block, racing toward the door, but it was closing! He threw his hands up as if to push the door away, to hold it open, imagined a torrent of water at his back, and sent a wave of dizzying Power into it. His body shook as the Magick worked through him and for a moment it seemed like his Power wasn’t strong enough, but the door swung open again hard and fast and Damien slipped through the break.
Lily slipped in after Damien, narrowly avoiding hitting her shoulder against the wall as she flew through the gap, but then the door shut behind them.
And they didn’t need to be told they weren’t alone.
/> CHAPTER 9
This cell-block has teeth.
Damien pressed his hand against the side of his head and for the first time winced from the dull throb beating beneath his fingers. It was as if the very sight unfolding before him were eating at his grey matter and sending him headlong into some kind of mad oblivion. But he didn’t have the time to wonder about his own mental health.
The cell-block had teeth, literal mouths in place of barred doors, and they were all gnashing, chattering, slavering, and howling. Some had lips, others just folded, crooked skin. Most were hurling obscenities and blasphemies in a cacophony of whispers too meek to be coming out of openings as tall as doors.
There was a man in the cell-block, too; someone in a uniform was sauntering down the row of gnashing mouths and rattling a baton against teeth as he passed them. The recognition was instant. Damien’s cousin Henry wasn’t a particularly noteworthy man, but he was tall, stork thin, and had a long nose which, along with a full head of black hair, sometimes made him look like a crow.
And like a crow, his eyes were reflective and bright.
“Inmate,” he said, pointing his baton toward them. “You’re out of your cells.”
“Damien,” Lily said, “Stay behind me.”
He didn’t argue with her, but not because he didn’t want to. His body was taut as and tense as a guitar string and he simply couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. It had been his cousin who came for him in the alley, his cousin who concocted whatever spell he used to keep Natalie trapped inside her own mind.
Natalie.
“We’re not inmates,” Lily said.
“You are now,” he said, approaching. “Like what I’ve done with the place?”
“Where is Natalie?”
“That shouldn’t matter to you, sweetheart. What should matter to you is what’s going to happen next.”
“And what’s that?”
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