The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) (23 page)

And it was that breath I meant to take away.

CHAPTER 24

It had been a long day. Collette had been blessed with enough foresight to know that we would need to be fed before going to the church so we had stopped for a bratwurst and fries before getting there. But now I was stuck with a dilemma.
Do I run to the bathroom and throw up my lunch on my own terms, or hope it doesn’t come out on its own later?

My hands were incapable of keeping still, clenching and loosening as I walked the death-march along the corridor joining the study we had all been sitting in and the main church building. And as we crossed the barrier between corridor and church I became aware of the thin film of sweat that had developed on my neck and chest, and immediately hated the feel of it.

But the dizzying height of the domed ceiling and the shine of gold and polished brass stole my attention away from the sweat, only to replace the sticky sensation with another one; nausea. The church seemed somehow bigger on the inside; its marble columns with gold inlays reaching high into the sky, the statues Christ, Mary, and the Angels looking impossibly tall, and candles… so very many candles. More than I had seen in my entire life.

The cathedral’s inner lights had been shut down leaving the candles to do all the hard work lending the building a warm, orange, flickering glow, making shadows dance and stretch and claw at columns and at the faces on statues and paintings. I found myself wondering how many candle-lit masses had taken place in this beacon of gothic architecture, how many desperate men and women had come in seeking the comforting—or stifling—confines of a confessional, how many weddings, baptisms… funerals.

It was easy to get lost in your own wonderment in a place like this; that is, if you cared for such things. I had always been fascinated by old churches and cathedrals, even if the religion didn’t appeal to me as a person. But you didn’t need to be religious or even
interested
in the religion to feel the weight of cosmic grandeur come crashing down on you. The idea—no, the certainty—that there was something
more
to life than what we could see, hear, and feel with our physical bodies. And that when we died, our souls would move on along whatever unknown and unknowable path awaited them. Cathedrals had a way of doing that to people.

At the foot of the altar I came upon the area the witches had set up to be their ritual space. It wasn’t much different from any other ritual space I had ever seen; five candles—a brown, blue, yellow, red, and white one—were sitting, one at each point of the five point star connected by an unbroken, interwoven band of white ribbon. Each of the candles represented one of the cardinal corners and the color of their elements; brown for north and earth, yellow for east and air, south for red and fire, west for blue and water, and finally the white one which represented the spirit.

The empty spaces between the connecting parts of the ribbon were large enough for one person to stand in, while the gap at the center of the pentacle was large enough for two or three. Each of the witches took their place at the elemental corner which suited them the most. When they were positioned, Helena called to Luther and asked him to stand in at the foot of the white candle. Since he was the conduit, he would stand in for spirit. Finally, Helena reached for my hand and walked me to the center of the pentacle with Collette following not far behind.

The cathedral fell into companionable silence when all of the witches were standing in their designated spots. The entire building was soundproof, and nor the hiss of hard rain on stone or the whizzing of cars driving along on the main traffic vein across the road from us could reach our ears. Instead, the silence was filled with the shallow breaths of nervous witches.

“Hold hands,” Helena said.

I took Collette’s hand and squeezed it, but we were separated from the other witches whose clasped hands now formed a full circle around us. Collette nodded at me and I nodded back, and in my heart I felt… something; a kind of buzzing, like static. It wasn’t Magick, though. It was
something else.
I remembered looking out of my kitchen window a few weeks ago, watching the rolling grey sky as a storm front approached Raven’s Glen, and feeling the sudden change in pressure. My ears popped as I watched and I knew
something
was about to happen, but not what.

“Dark Mother,” Helena started to say, “Hear us.”

The witches around us said “Hear us.”

“We call on you tonight as humble servants, as instruments of your divine will. Bless us with your light, oh Dark Mother, that we may use it to guide our path through the darkness. Hear us.”

Again the witches around the pentacle repeated the words “Hear us,” and their voices, combined with Helena’s, created a cacophony of sound that came back to us threefold, bouncing off the high church walls and off its domed ceiling in a headlong plunge before bouncing back up again upon touching the marble floor, a process which repeated until the sound died off in a distant echo.

When all was quiet again, Helena said “Luther, unlock your aura to us. It is the only link we have to her, and the only way we will be able to bridge the gap between us.”

Luther nodded, closed his eyes, and concentrated. I couldn’t see his aura like Helena could but I could taste it; bitter and dry, like licking a thick, old page in a dusty book. Not that I had ever done that, but I trusted in my mind’s interpretation of things most of the time and I wasn’t about to stop now.

That’s when things started to happen.

First was the hum. It was like the soft, dull sound that comes out of a power transformer. I had walked by the one on the street, just outside of my house, enough times to know what it sounded like. On those truly quiet Saturday mornings, when the whole town was asleep, you could sometimes hear it from my bedroom window, humming silently away, its internal mechanisms working hard to ensure every waking resident of my neighborhood had electricity to drink their morning coffee with.

Then there came the steadily growing vibration. This started shortly after Helena and her witches began to pray to the Dark Mother in their own languages and under their own breaths. I had never seen a ritual done like that before. Typically everyone spoke in the same language, most times in unison, other times in a row-your-boat style. But the energy they were generating was immense, and I was starting to feel the buzz in my toes first, and then in my shins and calves. Moments later and the vibrations were tickling my more sensitive areas; like a current rising along the inside of my thighs, climbing up between my legs, into my belly, my chest, my breasts, and my nipples.

A soft sigh escaped my mouth, and I had to bite down on my lip to stifle anymore rogue moans which may have wanted to make an egress. The feeling made me think of Aaron in that last moment before reality met fantasy, and I realized that I missed him very much, and that I would have liked to see him again before… before doing this. To answer his question, one way or the other.

But I didn’t get my wish.

Right before my eyes reality cracked open with a mighty rip. The fissure was only an arm’s length, but it was silver and bright and I raised my free hand up to protect my eyes from the light, but I didn’t have to. The brightness didn’t burn my eyes, just like the flickering flames licking outward from the crack didn’t sear my skin. And then I recognized the flames for what they were.

Moon Fire
.

I turned my eyes up to Collette, whose face was now awash with the light of the Goddess, and nodded at her. Then I reached for the crack with my hand, let the soft, cold fire kiss my skin, and bid the fissure to stretch with the power of my mind. And it did. The seam stretched and ripped further, silver fire spilling out from within, until the tear was about half as long as my whole body.

Without hesitation, I tucked my knee into my chest and pushed my foot into the crack of light. My body followed a second later. And then there was light. It was like those scenes from Star Wars where the starships enter hyperspace and reality stretches around them and turns bright white.

Stepping through that rip brought on a similar sensation. Though I found myself standing still, I got the feeling that I was in motion. Always moving. Moving forward. To where? Well, that was anyone’s guess. Although I knew to
whom
I was moving toward. I was going toward her, speeding across space in a tunnel of ethereal silver flames dancing all around me. Sparkling. Glittering. Shimmering. Mesmerizing. The little silver flecks burrowed into my hair and flew out of it again, hair that now looked fire red as it drank in the brightness around it. Impossibly, a soft wind seemed to tug at the strands, pulling it out of my face and backwards as if the tunnel was possessed of its own internal draft.

But there was nothing strange about the breeze at all. It was a draft; a draft caused by air flowing from one point—the church—to the other.
The other point.
I could see it now, a dark spot in a tunnel of silver light. The only other place any wind could go to, or come from. The only other place I could go to. Turning back wasn’t an option. Not now. Not while I was in transit. I didn’t know this on a conscious level; I just knew it in the same way one knows that once an elevator is told to go down or up, you can’t make it change direction until it’s done what it was supposed to do.

My only hope now, as I closed in on the black spot—or it came to me—, was that the person on the other side of it couldn’t see the light punching a hole in the fabric of reality. It was a dumb hope, sure. Because at the root of my nervousness, the catalyst of my almost need to throw up, was that Linezka knew what we were about to do and that she would be waiting for us, ready to strike just as soon as we crossed through the portal.

That we were walking into a trap.

But then I blinked, and the light was gone. The air was cold and dry and tasted conditioned. At the edge of my senses I could smell perfume; that kind of sweet, almost sickeningly sweet, aroma synonymous with youth. But there was also the heady scent of freshly snuffed candles and that, combined with the silence, was what made my flesh prickle all over.

When my eyesight returned—
should’ve kept my eyes closed in that tunnel after all
—, barely an instant after stepping through to what I believed was the other side of the portal, I could see shapes starting to form around me. A long, curved couch. A bar. Stools. A long table. And at the far end of the room I was in, a wall-window looking out over the Berlin skyline, the TV clearly visible against the stark night sky. Only, at second glance, it wasn’t the TV tower at all; it was the Space Needle.

I’m… in… Seattle? There I was expecting a castle or a dungeon.

There was something else to see here while the sands of time moved at a snail’s pace. It was a flicker of light I had at first glance believed to be a distant fork of lightning that drew my eye. But it was the sudden realization that the light wasn’t actually outside of the wall-to-wall curved window of this penthouse apartment, but rather
inside
the suite that stole my attention.

Then the lightning came in a mighty flash that lit up the sky and the room, and that’s when I saw the thing that chilled me. The thing that poked at the base of my spine like a finger of ice, and then stepped along its length disk by disk until finally the cold arrived at my neck and caused me to stiffen. A great big pentacle was lying on the polished mahogany floor. This one had a black candle at each of its five points, and a blood-red ribbon in favor of a white one. A flicker of green crackled a few feet above the center of the pentacle. A portal… and it was closing.

Hot fear leaped up into my throat and I dashed across the room, hurdling over the couch, running, sprinting toward the trickle of light which looked more now like a snake’s tongue, flicking and tasting the air around it. And I plunged my hand into fissure to grab the snake’s tongue and not let it go, but I was too slow.

“Amber?” Collette’s voice startled me.

I spun around, eyes wide and at the height of terror, the ball of hot bile still in my throat. “We’ve left them. We’ve left them alone!”

Collette drew in a deep breath.

“The fissure!” I yelled. I could still see it, my way back, the elevator waiting for me to tell it to go down, glowing and shining against the stark black background of the dark, empty penthouse suite. Collette turned, and by the time she did I was already beyond her, already running down the Moon Fire corridor, but no matter how hard my legs pushed the distance didn’t seem to close any faster.

It had been a trap. Oh Gods, it had been a trap!
Only it wasn’t the trap I had thought it would be. She knew we would be coming, somehow—maybe she had seen the future, or maybe the devil himself told her we would be coming—and all the while she had been concocting a plan of her own. And while I was taking my white light elevator ride to her, she was passing silently next to us like a thief in the night. She had timed it perfectly, down to the God-damned second, but she had made a crucial mistake.

I had been nervous before and my nerves may have impaired my ability to think, giving her an edge. Now I was pissed, and the anger had dissolved the nerves like an aspirin in water.