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Fury veiled Marian’s vision in a red haze. Good thing that the phone was industrial strength; otherwise it would have crumbled under her grip. How Candace could think of her own son that way…
“Andrew is a person with a challenging disease. Don’t define him as a victim.”
Candace sniffed. “Believe what you want. Now, about the fund-raiser, tell me whether the weather will be clear.”
Heat crept up Marian’s neck. She’d always had weather-sense. She shifted and felt the connection to Mother Earth, one reason she loved the garden-level apartment. “Clear and cool,” she said.
“Good. Your drive down from Boulder should be fine, then.”
Rubbing her forehead, Marian said, “I’ll be there.”
“I thought so, and bring that delightful Professor Wilse with you.”
Marian shuddered at the thought of Jack Wilse. Mistake. She admired his body but deplored his values. He’d manipulated and used her, too, before her mind got her hormones under control. It was inconceivable to her now that she’d had a brief affair with him. “He won’t be coming with me.”
“Marian, you can’t attend alone! How will it look? Speaking of looks, you have used that exercise club membership I bought for you so you’d lose those extra pounds, haven’t you?”
“My weight is my own business.” Candace would continue to comment on it anyway. “I will be coming alone—or not at all. If you want me there, deposit the rest of my college fund into my account and e-mail me the details.” Marian hung up.
Mistake. She’d allowed her mother to manipulate her. Would she ever learn? But this time, she’d gotten the last of her college fund. With chilled fingers she reached for her appointment book, flipped to the end where she’d listed her five-year plan. She inserted Friday’s date as the day she’d receive the money that would set her free from her mother, and launch her fully on her career path. Ahead of schedule, but right on track. She wouldn’t allow anything or anyone—especially her mother—to control her again. Her own mistakes might be bad, but they were hers. Hers to learn from.
She felt as if she’d been stung, and poison was spreading through her system. Like so many times before in her life. That’s what happened when you were raised by an unevolved Scorpio.
Grumbling, Marian stalked through her living room. A book from the bookshelf-lined walls thumped to the floor. She stopped and stared. There was a gaping hole on the second shelf where she kept her Wiccan books neatly alphabetized by author.
She swallowed. Even before she picked up the book, she knew what it would be: Craft Your Own Ritual, by a well-respected Wiccan. It was the third time this week that volume had fallen from the shelf.
As usual, the crisp pages fell open to a full-moon ritual. Rising anxiety made her pulse race. She closed her eyes and colors swirled behind her eyelids, followed by a flash of the image of Andrew from her nightmare.
Her eyelids flicked open. Her chest tightened. All the recent coincidental signs pointed to her conducting a full-moon ritual. Marian glanced at the yearly moon phase chart she’d framed. Full moon tomorrow night, Friday—the same night she’d agreed to attend Candace’s benefit.
A knock came at her door and a tingle ran up her spine. She pushed aside the curtain draped over the apartment door’s small window, looked out. Golden Raven stood on the threshold. She smiled until the lines deepened around her blue eyes and framed her mouth. Beyond her was an old van packed full of boxes, ready for a long trip.
With a sigh, Marian opened the door.
“I heard you call me,” Golden Raven said.
Jaquar’s Tower, Sorcerers’ Mue Island, east of LladranaLate spring, that same morning
Jaquar stood naked in the alcove that held his magical supplies and looked into the round ritual room of his tower. A faint blue-green steam eddied and flowed along the lines of the pentacle carved into the stone floor. His shoulders tensed at the thought of plane-walking—leaving his body behind to float astrally through different layers of existence. He was a Circlet—the highest rank of Sorcerer—of Weather Control and plane-walking, but he’d been focused on the second craft for the past three weeks.
Putting off the moment when he’d have to look in the Enhanced Mirror, the last step before the ritual, he turned back to the work counter and set his hand on the upper leaf in a huge book.
He’d made the book himself. Each sheet was a non-physical plane he’d traveled. Sheets were arranged in the same layers as the planes themselves. A being existed on many planes, but a good plane-walker like himself could separate himself from his body and explore one layer at a time.
The leaf he’d turned to was the plane he’d visit. One of seething, low emotions—evil emotions only. A plane for monsters, not humans. But he was tracking a monster. The monster that had killed his adoptive parents three weeks ago.
A chime notified him that the ritual should be started within the half hour. Jaquar inhaled deeply and went to the left end of the narrow alcove. There he unfolded the three-paneled mirror. To ensure he didn’t get lost amongst the planes, he had to know himself, and for that he used the mirror.
He scanned his physical appearance. He was taller than the average Lladranan male, had filled out in maturity. His strong body appeared nothing like that of the abandoned street boy Simone and Torrence Dumont had found and raised. But the awful inner loneliness of the boy before he’d known them filled him now. He’d once thought he’d never feel that desolation again.
His body showed a few childhood scars. His eyes were still the hated deep blue that made him an oddity in a brown-eyed culture. Some ancestor had not been Lladranan.
He’d lost weight since the deaths of his adoptive parents, but not so much that it would compromise his strength. His black hair touched his shoulders and looked limp, not as shiny as it should. The silver streaks denoting Power had visibly spread over the past three weeks as he’d searched for the evil thing that had killed his mother and father. Both had been powerful Circlets, yet the horror had sucked them dry of magic and energy and life.
As Jaquar had searched the planes for the killer, he’d grown in magical wisdom and Power, discovering new layers. These new planes would be valuable in tracking the horrors that invaded Lladrana.
The northern magical boundary of mainland Lladrana had been failing, gaping open so that hideous evil creatures could slither through to prey on the people. First the smaller horrors would cross, such as armored snippers. Then the greater monsters would attack in groups—renders and slayers and soul-suckers. And the sangvile. At the same time, frink-worms had started falling with the rain, affecting even the Tower community’s islands.
The horrors had never reached the Sorcerers’ town of Coquille-on-the-Coast where his parents had lived until Jaquar had led the sangvile there. He had answered the Marshalls’ call for a Sorcerer, given them information, then left. The sangvile had attached itself to the flying horse he’d ridden from the Marshalls’ Castle to his parents’ house. He’d left the deadly thing there, unknowing. Just two weeks past, the key to restoring the magical boundary had been found—too late for his parents.
He met his own hollow gaze in the mirror. “Mental,” Jaquar said. The reflection in the mirror changed and he saw the white sparkling of his brain, the waves of strong mental energy. The rhythm of his energy was good. His mind was clear.
“Magical,” he ordered. The mirror showed his Power radiating out in colorful bands from his body. Lladranans tended to judge magic by the tones and tunes it made, but the mirror reflected it visually. There were no breaks, no streaks of blackness. His Power had never been stronger. Good.
Jaquar hesitated. “Emotional,” he whispered, and saw his body shrouded in grief. Fury and vengeance glowed red in his eyes and heart. Not good. But he wasn’t going to travel to any plane that needed lighter, more uplifting emotions.
He’d be able to find that ugly lower plane easily, blend in, cruise through it.
“Spiritual,” he said. Again the darkness, nearly smothering the gold aura tracing his body. Ragged spikes showed how his spiritual health fluctuated. Perhaps when he’d destroyed the sangvile he would make an appointment with the Singer for a personal Song Quest. A Song Quest would tell him how best to manage his grief and guilt. Later.
“Physical.” There he was again, face strained, changed since his adoptive parents had died. He recalled his last leave-taking with his adoptive parents, no more than a month ago. Parents, they would have corrected him, not “adoptive parents.” They’d been right in that as in so many other things. Though they hadn’t birthed him, had only taken him off the streets when he was eight, they’d been his parents.
His last memory of them was as they laughed at some joke his father had told just before Jaquar left their home. They were framed in the golden light streaming from the doorway of their house. His mother, round of face and body, leaning into his father, the aura of love radiating from her….
Just the moment before, her sweet breath had caressed his cheek as she’d kissed him farewell. Her scent had wound around him—the flowery herb fragrance that had been his comfort from the moment she’d claimed him as her own.
His father had hugged him hard, as always, and Jaquar had felt the strength of Power and body that had always meant love and safety.
No more. Ever. All because of him.
He had brought their evil killer to them. The odd boy they’d saved from the streets had ultimately led their deaths to them, far before their time.
“Off.” His image faded and he was glad.
Unhurried, he walked to the pentacle, closed the circle with a hummed note, and settled into a soft pallet in the center to begin his quest to find and destroy his parents’ slayer. He sang.
When the Songspell ended, his astral shape slipped from his body with an easy pull and a tiny “pop.” Hovering over his physical form, he felt light and free.
He stayed in the same physical plane and rose above his Tower, his island, to orient and anchor himself. As was customary, his was the only Circlet Tower on the island, and the island itself was small. Most circlets lived on their own island in the Brisay Sea, east of Lladrana. He’d wanted one only a few miles from Coquille-on-the-Coast where his parents lived so he would visit them often.
On the physical plane, the sangvile had two forms: one, a black spiderweb, and the other, a manlike dark energy. Its rudimentary, nasty emotions were that of an evil predator. As strong as it was now, if spread out in spiderweb form, it would cover a house. The man form would be a giant.
The monster had gloated over the pain and fear it caused, laughed in malicious glee at its feast of Circlets and their Power. Those tainted emotions had leaked through several planes and led Jaquar to it. He had found the horror too late to pin it down, set it ablaze and watch it die.
Below, he saw his Tower, round and of red stone, with a flat roof and a walkway around it; Mue Island, looking like the blunted top of an archery arrow, slightly southwest of Coquille-on-the-Coast. He drifted even higher, until he could see most of Lladrana, the rocky hill where the Marshalls’ Castle sat—in the middle of Lladrana, far from the ocean, east and north of Coquille-on-the-Coast. He tugged on the cord between his astral self and his body. It held firm.
Then he plane-walked, searching for the sangvile.
He passed through several known planes to reach the one he wanted, tuning himself to its unique vibrations. Only on this plane could he pinpoint the hideous energy of the sangvile.
And there was the monster that had slain his parents. And Jaquar lusted to destroy the sangvile with all the fierce desire within him. Here, the sangvile was a gliding black smudge.
Jaquar was back on the hunt. Though this lower emotional plane was a gray nothingness, Jaquar could dimly sense the geography of the physical plane below, where the sangvile roamed. Here, the image of the sangvile was a gliding black smudge, traveling northwest from Lladrana. Jaquar followed.
No sights; worse, no sounds. The dreary atmosphere made his emotions all the more powerful.
The sangvile moved. Geographic familiarity, physical reference points, were gone. The sangvile was far outside the borders of Lladrana, flying north with information and energy and magic to give the Dark.
Jaquar’s astral self followed. As a mind-shadow, Jaquar had no eyes to weep or voice to scream his grief. The emotions that gave him the strength and cunning to track the beast scoured him, made him vengeance incarnate. He would kill the servant and destroy the lord. No price was too high to pay.
The thing hesitated in flight, then lashed out with a black-energy tentacle. Jaquar ducked, drew back. Was it aware of him? Aware of something as predatory as itself, as ruthless?
Coalescing into a streak of dark lightning, the horror sped up. The monster was near its…nest?
Ahead, the grayness of the ethereal plane changed. In the distance was a black point. Jaquar sensed something huge and vile and pulsing.
2
In front of Jaquar seethed a mound of evil so dark that it swallowed all light, all energy. The sangvile rounded itself into a ball and arced downward into a hole of red, with tentacles of gray and acid green and black. The mound radiated a loathsome, diseased feeling that seemed to coat Jaquar with slime.
The place was inimical to all humans. And it was hungry.
No price was too much to pay to avenge his parents.
Jaquar flung his astral-self into it.
And hit a magical shield. Rebounded, stunned and aching.
He spent his rage battering the magical barrier with all his might, all of himself. He shifted to planes above and below and struck the shield time and again, then returned to the first plane.
Jaquar Dumont. A sneering voice resounded in Jaquar’s head along with a hideous clash of notes. He stopped his fruitless assault. Hovered. Wondered whether to reply, if acknowledgment would make him vulnerable.
The great Jaquar Dumont, bastard with tainted Exotique blood, the voice continued, and Jaquar realized it was human—and male.
A human Sorcerer consorting with the horrors and monsters that invaded Lladrana? Had Jaquar been in his physical form he’d have been sick with revulsion. Did Jaquar know the voice? He didn’t think so. He did sense the Power of the Sorcerer. The Sorcerer was nearly a Circlet—but he wasn’t the true and ultimate evil. The man served another.
The Sorcerer laughed at Jaquar. So, you have found us, but only on this low plane. You cannot break the Dark’s shield, nor harm this nest. No Sorcerer or Sorceress of Lladrana can.
Come out and fight! Jaquar threw the mental call to the human.
The Sorcerer snorted. If and when I exit our nest it will be with an army, or allies so strong that no one will be able to stop us.
All of Lladrana will fight you! Jaquar shouted, trying to pierce the shield with Mind and Power alone. Futile.
More sneering laughter. The Marshalls have discovered how to raise the magical barrier against us. But in two weeks they have not done much. The Marshalls are few and slow. The boundary still has many gaps.
Wild shrieking came from the human. If he’d been sane at one time, he wasn’t now.
Gathering himself into a spear of Power, Jaquar arrowed to the red maw-gate of the pulsing mound. And was flung away.
The sangvile is safe from you, as are all the servants I control. You will never be able to pass the shield on any plane. No Lladranan with Power can breech this forcefield. No Lladranan can hurt this nest. The voice insinuated into Jaquar’s mind as he continued to batter at the gate. Since you loathe the sangviles so much, I will set more upon Lladrana. Soon. Aimed at Circlets.
Despairing, Jaquar continued the assault until his energy faded and he had only enough strength to return home. He awoke hours later, body stiff, psychically blind since he’d abused his Power. With croaking voice, he dismissed the magical pentacle.
Jaquar staggered to his desk and fell into his chair, ready to record all he knew of the sangvile, all he’d learned in his pursuit. His face was colder than the rest of him. He lifted his hand and touched his cheek. It was wet.
Boulder, Colorado
The same morning
Marian froze. “I didn’t call you.”
Golden Raven raised little penciled-in eyebrows and pushed by her to enter the apartment. “I heard you.” She tapped her head, glanced around and took a seat on the couch.
“I find that very strange.” Just as odd as everything else that was happening. Marian shut the door.
Golden Raven wore tight jeans and shirt that did nothing for her heavy figure. But unlike Marian, Golden Raven accepted her body. “I know you do, but just listen. My vision was of you and a young man who looked a great deal like you—except he had black hair instead of your red.”
Andrew. Marian had never told Golden Raven about him. Marian had met a lot of frauds while taking New Age classes, and Golden Raven wasn’t one of them. The woman was a brilliant forecaster.
Tilting her multi-shaded blond head, Golden Raven surveyed Marian’s apartment. “Very much like you, Marian. Books, papers, everything too neat and tidy. Still striving for perfection, I see.”
“Golden Raven, I’m running late for my job—”
“Our paths are not the same, but I had to tell you of the vision before Wood Elk and I left for the West Coast.” She looked at Marian, eyes narrowed. “You have a great deal of intelligence, and more—just plain magic in you, right beneath the surface. But you dabble. You don’t commit yourself to freeing your powers.”
Marian wasn’t accustomed to teachers berating her. She stood stiffly beside Golden Raven.
“You dabble, not taking what you learn seriously. Yet I feel a brilliant spark within you, humming just under your skin.” She tapped Marian’s chest above her breasts. “Strong magic.”
“Golden Raven, it would be interesting if that were true. But—”
“You feel your psi powers trying to break free and even now reject them. I heard you calling me this morning—can you deny that?”
“No.” But she wanted to. On the other hand, she’d always had an internal push to find…something…ever eluding her. Could it be magic? Could she have strong psychic powers? She’d only been aware of her weather sense and her connection to Mother Earth.
Golden Raven grasped Marian’s arm, then stilled, her eyes going blank and unfocused. “The full moon. Tomorrow night.” Golden Raven sucked in a breath and stepped back from Marian, breaking the physical connection. She shook her head, then met Marian’s eyes. “I don’t know what it means. I can’t tell you. Except that this full-moon ritual is very important for you. It will be life changing. For you and your brother.”
Her words were as fearsome as Marian’s nightmares, and seemed just as real. Believe, or not? Golden Raven had mentioned Andrew again, the bait Marian would always swallow.
She said steadily, “When I said your name this morning I wanted to ask if you knew others who had had experiences like these I’ve been enduring.”
“Your psi potential demanding to be fulfilled. Do the ritual, find one who will help you direct it. As for your brother, he is linked to you and I believe he will be…greatly affected in a good way by your psi development.” She opened her mouth, then shut it and shook her head again. “No, I should not tell you, even if I could. I’m sorry, Marian. I must go now, and Blessings upon you.” With a little duck of her head she turned and left the apartment. The door clicked shut behind her.
Marian barely saw her go as emotions churned inside her. She needed another shower, although a hot bath would be better to banish the sudden chill.
She might have shrugged off the continuing auditory illusions, might have ignored Golden Raven’s advice to find another teacher. Might have continued to “dabble” in New Age spirituality on her way to receiving her doctorate. But she would never ignore any threat to her brother. Andrew was the person she most loved. She’d do the ritual tomorrow night.
