by E M Graham
And then it loosened its hold on me, enough for me to gather my energy and head slowly back to the field where my body sat. I reached me and sank gratefully into my corporeal self again.
Yet the blue tether remained around me and held me fast. I tried to slip out of Alt – usually it was so effortless! But I remained stuck in that apple orchard. The line of energy which bound me stretched off into the distance towards Alt Town, and I was alone, even the cows moved away from that fearsome magic, their mournful lows echoing my despair.
“Help me!” I called out towards the old farmhouse, but it remained dark, no lights within. The late afternoon was growing into dusk, unnaturally so, and the wind continued to rise.
I remained like this for an hour or more, the pain dulled to a roar, until I felt the faint gallop of a horse’s hooves through the turf below me.
Dara? Can you hear me?
“Hugh!” I looked all around me, over among the apple trees and the cows then above in the sky but saw no sight of him. “I can’t see you, where are you?”
No matter, I can see you.
“Is that you on the horse? Did you do this to me?” I asked the air. The hooves were pounding louder. “Why, Hugh? Do you know how much it hurts? Untie me right now, you shit head! I’m sorry, okay? I did what you told me not to do, but I really think this is a bit extreme!”
Shut up and don’t move from that spot. I’m on my way.
Don’t move, he said? As if I could.
Through the dusk, I could see the other end of the blue rope racing towards me, held by a dark shape on a black horse. I tried to stand but the light strand held me fast in place, and the more I struggled the tighter it became. I was fuming at Hugh, ready to stalk off and leave him, but couldn’t.
The rider grew closer, a cloaked figure on a coal black horse. They were almost upon me before they pulled in, the horse whinnying loudly with his eyes rolling. It was a huge beast. I cowered close to the tree I could so that it didn’t step on me.
And at last I saw that it was not Hugh who held the reins, but Seth. The tormenter, the outsider. How could this be?
“Oh, oh, what have we here?” As he reined in his mount, he wore a smile but it wasn’t friendly. The look in his eye was hungry and covetous.
“If it’s not the treacherous little half-blood sister,” he said as he swung himself down off the horse. “What are you doing in Alt?”
I stayed mute. Hugh was on his way, he’d said he was.
Seth moved closer to me and laughed. “Looks like there might be two for the service tonight.”
My heart sank. It was true – he had Alice and planned to, what? Sacrifice her on his altar to his dark gods? I remembered Mark’s description of the torture the other woman had undergone, and I shivered.
But then Seth stopped being so cheerful, and he yanked on the magic power line. It hurt like slivers of glass pulled through my skin. “How did you get here?” He leaned in close to me. “Who taught you how to switch into Alt, little mouse?
“Not going to answer me, eh? No matter. I can get the information I need.” Seth stood back, stroking his clean shaven chin. I could feel him probing inside my mind and clamped my eyes shut, the better to close my thoughts from him.
“I’m impressed,” he said finally, and he really did sound it. “A power like yours, and in a half-blood no less! Too bad you’re not better trained.’
Next time I would listen to Hugh, I promised myself, when he said not to do something. If there was a next time.
“Hugh, eh? Can’t say he did you much good, only half teaching you like that,” Seth moved closer. “He didn’t teach you to cover your tracks, you know, and he could have. Should have. I saw you up there spying, leaving the magic exhaust behind you like the vapor trail from an airplane. Totally unnecessary. I could teach you properly. Why not let me be your tutor, little mouse?”
He squat down beside me and began gently stroking the hair out of my eyes. His hand wandered down my cheek to the tender skin on my neck. My skin tingled where he touched me, oh so lightly, but it felt like burning as if he were igniting my very atoms. I couldn’t move, and I’m not sure I wanted to.
“I can teach you to do things you only dream about,” he whispered, his cold breath in my ear, then he took my chin in hand and gently brought my face up to his. “You could be my apprentice. My own little half-blood helper.”
I couldn’t take my eyes away from his. I felt like I had been thirsting without knowing it all my life and was now able to drink in the aqua vitae that only Seth could offer, drinking him in like he was the source of life itself. The black depths of his eyes were fast becoming the world to me as they mesmerized me, and I felt stirrings deep inside me, as if a light glowed in a dark pit I’d never known was there. He shifted his cloak to envelope me, to shield me from the rising wind.
And then he kissed me. Can I tell you how it feels to be kissed by a witch with his power? Can you comprehend the spell he was placing over me, weaving around me? I was transported by the promise his lips gave me, ready to throw it all to the wind.
And even betray Alice, for he whispered to me what we could do in his ceremony, how my powers would be made tenfold, and how I could reign by his side. The dark power surged through my very bones, filling me with him. He planted a seed inside me then, by awakening a hunger in me, a need for more and more. I was ready to surrender anything, everything, if only he would take me into him.
But far off in the distance of another world, I heard a car door slam and a deep voice call my name.
21
SETH MUST HAVE relaxed his grip on my tether, secure in the knowledge I was in his power, or perhaps he also felt the power of Hugh coming close to us, heard him striding through the underbrush another world away. In an instant he had let go of me both physically and magically, loosened the bonds and tossed me aside into the ether, not caring which dimension I landed in. I hovered between the two worlds like a ghost for those few seconds. It felt like a lifetime, not being of one or the other.
I opened my eyes to see Hugh running towards me in real time and although I was free to move again, I couldn’t summon up the energy it required. I could sense Seth slipping away over in Alt.
“Seth,” I coughed out as Hugh neared. “He’s in Alt...”
Hugh’s outline wavered in the dusk as he flipped then solidified once more. He shook his head. “He’s on a horse,” he said. “No way to catch him. Not right now.”
“But Alice...”
“It’ll have to be later,” he replied, his voice grim.
He held me in his arms as I caught my breath and we were firmly in this world, even though I sensed he wanted more than anything to get into Alt and stop whatever demons had had hold of me over there.
Finally he held me back from him and searched my face. “What happened?”
“I did what you told me not to do,” I confessed, meeting his eyes reluctantly. Could he see the mark that Seth had left there in my mind, the burning on my skin where it still tingled from his touch? Could he see the searing Seth had left on me deep within? “I went looking for Alice in Alt.”
“Jesus,” he breathed, and held me close again. “You bloody idiot.”
“I couldn’t find her,” I said, my voice muffled by his chest, then I slowly told him everything that had happened on my foray onto Alt.
He stepped back to allow me to speak.
“But I think they may have her underground somewhere,” I said. “Because... I also couldn’t get any sense of Benjy over there either. And he’s in Alt, in the fairy den below the surface. Am I right?”
Hugh nodded slowly. “So this means...”
“Yeah, we have to find out which cellar or cave she’s in.” I looked around the trees and at the city which was now quickly disappearing into the dark in this unlit field. Seth had not followed me out of Alt, there was not even a glimmer where he could have been. “And quickly, because Seth is having his... thing... tonight.”
&nb
sp; “Somewhere underground, in Alt or here,” he repeated, then shook his head. “We won’t be able to search for her. We don’t have the witch power.”
We were both silent till he spoke again. “The best we can do is to return to the ceremonial site and stop them there. That’s the only way we can be prepared enough.”
I didn’t question that he was right.
NO ONE WAS AT HOME at Dad’s house; they must all have been busy getting ready for the evening’s events. Hugh led me into the study with him as he literally wasn’t letting me out of his sight, and he said he had things to do before we went to lay in wait at the site high over Portugal Cove.
“I need to do some searching,” he said softly after he had me sit in one of the deep leather armchairs. He stood over me with his hands on his hips and stared down. “Can I trust you not to move? Please don’t try to follow me.”
I nodded mutely. This half-blood wasn’t going anywhere, especially not into Alt, not with Seth on the go. I’d learned that lesson.
Behind the desk, Hugh was sitting very still, his body barely breathing. Meanwhile, I was still trying to process what had happened in that lonely field in Alt with Seth.
What did it mean, that darkness he had opened up deep inside of me? I was still shaken at what I’d found inside myself – that willingness to join him, to sacrifice Alice if need be, in order to quench that black thirst for power, to fulfill my hunger for Seth. I tentatively probed that place inside of me, but quickly backed away before I could get into the heart of it when I realized I didn’t want to see into that part of myself.
For distraction, I looked around Dad’s study. The few times I’d been in here, I had never been free to just sit and gawp. Two walls were covered floor to ceiling with leather-bound books old and new, all looking very important and severe and nothing there that you would read for fun. Covering the heavy coffee table between the two armchairs was a large, spread out paper. Hugh had told me not to move an inch, but I figured it didn’t count if I kept my bum in the chair and was really quiet about it, so I shifted my body over to examine it more closely.
It was a map, I saw as I twisted my head round and leaned over it. A map of the Avalon Peninsula, the oddly shaped eastern end of the island of Newfoundland, the bit that had floated over from Africa all those millions of years ago when the earth was still young and defining itself.
There were some streets marked in, some communities, but it was old and very out of date. It was also topographical, that much I could figure, with the high points on the landscape indicated by concentric circles. No highways crisscrossed the barrens or connected the tiny communities strung along the coast like random flotsam washed up on the shore. I reached out to bring it closer and as I touched the paper, I felt the tingle that spoke of the magic in this document, and I realized it was a map of Alt.
I caught my breath in excitement, and quickly darted a glance at Hugh, but no problem there. He was still in his trance or astral travel, whatever he was doing. The paper was about three feet by three feet square.
There were lines drawn all over it, sort of like the latitude and longitude lines on a regular map, but instead of a grid pattern these lines intersected at weird angles like a math problem. Alice would probably make better sense of what it conveyed than I could. Some lines started in the middle of the topographical circles, some petered away off the map in all directions.
Hugh stirred in the chair across from me. My movements must have disturbed him.
“It’s a map of Alt with the ley lines charted in,” Hugh said.
“The what lines?”
“Ley lines,” he repeated. “In the Normal world, they’re thought to be magnetic influences in the earth. In Alt, the best way I can describe it is they’re seams of magic.”
He had to dumb down a lot of explanations for me back then. My finger found the location of the natural bowl in the mountain behind Portugal Cove, and followed the line where it met a bunch of other lines passing through Pippy Park, the huge wilderness area donated to the city years ago, which in recent time was becoming surrounded by new builds. The park stood on the highest point of land over the town. “What’s this intersection here?”
“That’s where many of the local lines converge, one of the most important locations for us as witches,” he said. “It’s like a power source for us, and where the Kin built the temple.”
“Temple? In the middle of Pippy Park?” I asked. “I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of a witch temple.”
“It was constructed with buffers,” he replied. “It’s not in Alt, but it might as well be for all Normals can see it.”
“Sounds religious,” I said after thinking about that for a bit. “Do witches worship God?”
“A little more complicated than that,” he replied. “But the same sort of idea, yeah. The Holy days are celebrated there.”
I traced the line past the location of the temple where it ended on the Southside Hills, near the end overlooking the ocean, again at the highest point, and shivered.
“We haven’t a lot of time.” Hugh broke in. “But I want to teach you something you’ll need.”
“What, like spells?” I brightened, for although he had shown me how to do stuff, and use my power, he’d never gotten into the nitty gritty of spell casting.
“Spells?” He looked incredulous. “Dara, you read too many fairy tales. There’s no such thing as spells.”
“But, then how do witches do their magic?”
“They... We do our magic through using our powers,” he said. “Our own power, we don’t call on some outside force to do the work for us.”
He actually rolled his eyes at my ignorance.
“Well, excuse me,” I muttered.
“Never mind,” He said. “You picked up on how to block thoughts quickly without any instruction, so this should be easy enough for you to do.”
He came and sat across from me. “Now you need to learn how to hide yourself.”
“Be invisible you mean?” I liked the sound of this.
“Not as such, it’s more like camouflage,” he said, considering his words carefully. “Like blurring your edges so that you blend into the background.”
I looked at him doubtfully. “How do I do that?”
“The same as you do anything else,” he said. Was that impatience in his voice? “You picture yourself doing it, and just do it. Come on, give it a try.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “I can’t picture it.”
“Well, you can’t do anything if you tell yourself you can’t.” Yes, he was getting exasperated. But as I looked, he began to... not disappear, no, more like exactly what he said it was, as if the chair he sat in was becoming more visible than him, not that he was growing smaller, but that the outlines of him were turning armchair color, so to speak, and it was hard to tell where he ended or the chair began.
“Like this,” he said. “Imagine it first, then relax into it.”
And I tried to get the feeling of it. I could do all right with the imaginings, but the last bit gave me a little trouble until I realized how the relaxing was supposed to go, like a widening of myself, starting from my back hips and shoulder blades, and allowing it to move through me like a wave. Looking down, I was pleased to see my jeans blurring at the edges.
“Not great,” he remarked. “But good enough for now. Let’s get ready.”
He led me into the hallway, where he gave me the once over. Reaching into the hall closet, he handed me a black cotton hoody, an old one which might have passed though all three of my half-brothers. “Try this on.”
It was big on me, oversized, the way a hoody should be. My white sneakers were already grubby enough with grass stains and scuff marks, so I passed his inspection. He exchanged his leather jacket for a matching hoody in a larger size. It didn’t really suit his look.
“The leather will catch the moonlight,” he said, noticing the shake of my head.
“There’s
no moon out there, Hugh,” I said. “It’s too cloudy.”
“Believe me, there will be where we’re going,” he said.
Outside there was no moon in sight, like I had told him, but the wind had risen even more, gusting and catching at the leaves still not turned color but ripped from their branches regardless. We took the SUV again, travelling out of the city at speed. I looked around at the hurricane happening all around us. Parts of the city were blacked out already, the result of old tree branches cracking off and bringing down power lines, no doubt, yet still there was enough reflected light to see the clouds racing over the city towards the ocean.
We went back up to the wilds of the mountain behind Portugal Cove, the highest point on this eastern shore of Conception Bay, and we battled our way across the barrens to the site of Seth’s ceremony. I walked behind Hugh in order to shelter from the terrific force of the wind and even still I had to hold on to him to avoid being blown off the high ground. As we stood on the lip of the bowl, the wind was cutting through the thick cotton I wore, and I wrapped my arms around my body to conserve what heat I could. We looked down, and there was nothing to be seen except loose pebbles rattling through the tall grasses. No moonlight. It was still hidden by the clouds.
“You sure about this?”
He shook his head. “They should be in mid ceremony by now,” he said so softly I almost didn’t hear him above the wind even though we stood shoulder to shoulder. He brought his hand up to his mouth. “Bloody hell.”
“Do we have the right night?” But I knew we did. Seth had said so not hours before.
Shoulders bowed against the force of the gale, he put his arm around me. “Let’s go,” he said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to bring us to the temple. We’re going to need backup. We haven’t got a moment to spare.”
He took the SUV on a twisty path on gravel roads I hadn’t known existed, around Winsor Lake and up the back side of Pippy Park. The temple was located in a small clearing of the boreal forest of this hillside, an ancient untouched woods at the edges of the city. As we breached the top of the hill ready to go down to the spot, I glanced across the landscape. From way up here, you could see straight across St. John’s right to the Southside Hills. Or where that mountain should have been.
