Fall of Light (33 page)

“The whole cast and crew were possessed,” Opal said.

Bethany strolled over and dropped onto the couch beside Tobias. “Possessed? That makes no sense. You know that, right? Possessed. Huh. By what?”

“The spirit of the place. Same thing that stole women in the fifties, and made your childhood scary, and crawled into your dreams at the B&B while you were writing the script.”

“But that's—but you—but that's crazy.”

“Get over it. There's something underground here that's been sleeping a long time, and it's awake now. It's been messing with the production all along, one way or another, and today it went crazy and we all had a great big lovefest out there in the woods, with the cameras rolling. So maybe this turns out to be porn.”

“Porn? Porn? Goddamn it. Not again.”

“I was kind of out of it while it was happening, so I don't know if anybody got decent tape. But—” Opal felt her cheeks heat. Maybe she should just say it now. Tobias, watching alertly, needed to know this, too, no matter how embarrassing it was. “Corr and I were the stars out there on the altar. Not that we were the only ones. Just—we were the ones with the good lighting and camera angles. But pretty much everybody went nuts simultaneously.”

“Whoa,” said Bethany.

“So that's what happened.” Opal slumped back on the couch. Corvus eased an arm around her shoulders. She wasn't sure that was what she wanted, given how little she knew about who he actually was, but it felt good. She relaxed into the embrace and closed her eyes.

Other Opal was waiting for her on the inside of her eyelids. “Do you remember what happened this afternoon yet?”

“Go away.”

“Come on, this is part of our journey now. You stop running away from who you are and what you've done. Remember what you know about this guy's body, and what else we touched while we were with him. Decide from an informed place whether you want his arm around you right now.”

“Is there a reason why I might not want that?”

“I'm not going to tell you. You need to decide for yourself.”

Opal let her memory open on the afternoon. She had been in two or three places at once: on the altar; on a version of the altar in a dream; inside her own mind, flying around and looking at her fortifications, which guarded against some things and not others. An edge of the memory flapped at her like a flag in wind. What was that? She leaned over and gripped the loose corner, lifted it, opened a door into a fourth reality.

Lying under a bumpy transparent surface like a frozen sea lay a rivery network of lights and darks, a lacework in three dimensions through which green and blue colors pulsed and flowed, although they were running slowly, and many parts of the network were dim. There was such depth to the vision she could not see the bottom, only that the roots of the rivers twisted down into darkness and faded from view. From the surface of the sea rose many tall columnar shapes with nets of faint light threading through them, but they were hard to see in this dark expanse.

In one place the lines of light converged, braided amongst themselves and rose upward into one of the surface bumps, upwelling, reaching tendrils up toward—

Two forms in the rough shape of humans lay on top of one of the shorter bumps; it was squat, like a table. The larger one, whose body was interwoven with the same sorts of light rivers as the ground, and another, smaller, beneath the first, who was laced through with interlocking snowflakes of red and orange fire.

Opal focused and found herself drawing closer to the two. She stared at the transparent hands of the lower figure, which were bright with internal mehndi lacework, the fingertips alight with whorls and flowers of pulsing red light. The hands, the arms, reached up from the lower figure to embrace the other on top of her, and where their bodies intersected, his cooler colors of light exploded into her, and her own fires dived under his transparent skin to mix with his, to feed his, until the dimmer lines of light inside him grew brighter, their colors shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. This was where she had surrendered, let her shield drop, and she and whatever it was that laced all through the ground under Lapis, whatever it was that had invaded Corvus, had connected. The ground brightened and stirred with the influx of light. Though she fed her energy into the other's net, she did not become depleted. The rivers of green energy had flowed into her as she had flowed into them.

So he, the presence under the ground, Phrixos, whoever it was, had drawn from her even as he put himself into her—and where was Corvus in this equation? She hadn't had a moment alone with him to find out how much of Corvus was left.

A rosy flush ran all through the networks, then faded, leaving the whole of the webwork brighter than it had been before. All around the two figures were other faint networks she had ignored while she had watched herself. Where these networks touched the surface, water from the underground rivers flowed up into them. The whole of the film crew and cast, doing whatever they had done while she and Corvus's body had been engaged with each other. Lines of green force ran through everything, faintly, then faded again, leaving the people more transparent, still alive in faint lingers of light, but not as influenced from the underground as before.

This was when they woke.

Opal opened her eyes. Tobias and Bethany were staring at her. “What?” she said.

“Waiting for an answer,” said Tobias.

“Was there a question?” She glanced toward Corvus.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“I was thinking back to what happened in the clearing.” She watched as his face rippled in search of an expression. Two or three people inside him seemed to be trying to decide who would control the surface. She felt a brief prickle of grief at the thought that she was losing Corvus before they'd had time to explore each other.

He settled for looking worried.

“So was there a question? I'm sorry I missed it. Could you fill me in now?”

“Your uncle wants to know what you want him to do,” said Bethany.

“Yes,” said Opal. “That's a good question. Corr, you stay here, all right?” He shifted his arm, tightened it around her. She straightened, and he relaxed his grip so she could rise. “Tobias, will you come with me?”

“Assuredly,” he said. He followed her out of Bethany's room and down two floors to Opal's.

They sat facing each other across the table. She stretched out her hands, and he laid his own on them, staring into her eyes. “What on earth has been happening?” Tobias asked.

“Oh, Uncle,” she said, and lifted her hands to press them to her eyes.

He was beside her then, his hand on her arm, the weight of a fallen leaf, a chance gift. She lowered her hands and took one of his, careful not to squeeze. When she was younger, she had thought Uncle Tobias would go on forever, like the tides and the moon, but ever since Christmas Eve, when her sister's spell had given her a glimpse of the hidden ways of things, she had known her uncle was ancient and more fragile than he appeared. His skills and wisdom still burned with clear flames, some of them clearer and stronger as his physical powers faded. He had lost his role as the all-powerful elder, though, whether he recognized it or not. His hand was warm, but felt breakable.

He sat silent while she explained the changes Corvus had undergone since they started filming, the surges of power she had felt underground, her own confusion and participation, culminating in the orgy that afternoon. “Nobody's blamed me for that, as far as I know,” she muttered, “but I'm no longer hidden in my talents. Four or five people know I'm not just another normal human being.”

“Given the circumstances—forces acting on them, and the peculiar atmosphere that gives people permission to believe the unlikely,” Tobias said, “this is not terribly surprising.”

“I think it's the first time since high school that I might need to clean up after I've made a mess, though.”

“Or maybe not,” he said.

“Not? After yesterday?”

“Let's wait and see how all this plays out. It sounds like it's already self-correcting. One of my questions now is, are you in personal danger? Should we work some wards for you?”

“Flint sent me some nonstandard energy that works as a shield.”

“What? Explain that.”

She told him about Flint's attack over the phone, and he said, “I keep forgetting to watch that boy! This is fascinating! Can you manifest some of this power for me?”

She closed her eyes and went into her mental study. The fire was faint in the fireplace. She stooped before it and held out her hand. “What's the matter?” she asked.

“You don't need us anymore,” it said, flames reaching out to brush her skin with heat.

“I do, though. Don't go away. You're some of the best stuff I've got.”

“Are you sure?” The flames grew.

“I'm sure. Thanks. Please stay lively.” She fed the fire sticks of dried, seasoned wood. She didn't remember putting wood into this room, but it was handy that there was some close at hand. Then she wondered if someone had meddled with the wood, but by that time the fire had eaten three big sticks and burped.

Opal sat on the floor and laid her hand over the remaining wood, sought through it for an explanation.

“I put it there,” Other Opal said from behind her.

“Did Phrixos mess with it?”

“No. It came from our own forest. Flame, eat more. We need you. I didn't mean to dismiss you altogether; I just needed you to lie low for a while.” Other Opal fed the fire with Opal, and the flames reached up to lap at her hands as she added wood.

“We have a forest?”

“There are a lot of rooms here you haven't seen. We have all kinds of things.” Other Opal held a hand near the fire, and a flame jumped to hover above her palm. She turned and held it out to Opal, who accepted it. It melted down over her hand like hot butter, a golden haze of light. “Open your eyes,” Other Opal whispered, and Opal opened her eyes to stare into Tobias's face as he leaned over her.

She lifted her hand, and it wore the flame like a translucent glove, a beautiful color of yellow orange like sunset light. Tobias sucked in breath, untucked something from a pocket and held it out to the flame. The flame wicked toward it, a twist of pale string, made the jump, sizzled at the end of the twine for a moment, then faded. The string turned ocher. Tobias held it close to his face and sniffed it.

Opal rubbed her hands across each other. The flame seeped under her skin, a transient warmth, a continuing comforting presence.

“Strange and elegant,” said Tobias. “And, of course, unprecedented. Is it entirely Flint's?”

“I had to transmute it so I could use it, but I think it's the Flint part that makes it work.”

“His gift may lie in mixing his magic with others',” Tobias muttered. “But that's something to explore another time. This worked as a shield?”

Opal spoke to the Flintfire, asked it to shield her the way it had before, and it rose up and enveloped her, not visibly, but in an embrace she could feel. She held out her hands palms facing her uncle, and he closed his eyes and sent questing fingers of power toward her. They stubbed against her shield. He opened his eyes. Their normal pale blue flared brighter, and he sent a spear of power at her that made her gasp. If she had seen it coming toward her in a regular argument with someone in her family, she would think she had really hurt someone's feelings and they wanted to kill her.

It splashed against her shield and parted, went around her and sizzled against the chair she was sitting in. “Uncle!” she cried, leaping up. Parts of the chair were history; some of them were still smoking.

“As I thought. An amazingly effective tool.”

“You could have killed me!”

“True,” he said, “but I didn't think you would let me, and I was right. I'm glad you've got this kind of armor, Opal. The situation calls for it.”

“What do you see as the situation?”

“You already know it. An uppity dormant god power has grasped opportunity and seeks to rise again. It's a smart one, and it sees you as its chief vehicle. This is a role you've been preparing for much of your life. You know, when I was teaching you as a teenager, you took some of the lessons wrong. I never meant for you to suppress your powers; I just wanted you to learn to use them responsibly. Don't let this thing take you over and use you, Opal. Make your choices. Lay it to rest. If it gets out, who knows what it will do?”

Opal felt strange, listening to Tobias. He said aloud things she had been worrying about, and suddenly she felt contrary and didn't want to believe them. Or she wanted to reframe them.

“The question is: Do you need my help?” he said. “You have your armor, and you have your powers; there's some shifting going on inside you that I'd like to explore; it feels weighty. I think you have the power to stop this yourself, but I'll help if you want me to.”

“Would you turn around and go home now if I asked you to?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Even though you never leave home, and now you have? Seems like a long time since you went out in the world. I appreciate your coming. Would you be mad at me because you made this trip for nothing?”

“It was not for nothing. You're right, it's been a long time since I was out in the world, and I know now I should do it more often. Santa Tekla is not the world. I feel invigorated, in fact, by having brushed up against so many different kinds of powers and people and communities on my journey. Will you dismiss me, Opal?”