Chapter 13 #2
“You’re correct about that. I’m distracting myself. Old habits die hard, I suppose.”
“Putting blindfolds on girls is an old habit?”
He lets out an amused grunt. “Let’s start the ritual, shall we?”
He goes behind me and places his hands on my shoulders, his mouth coming down to the nape of my neck. He breathes in like he’s smelling me. “I’m going to hold you from back here so you can keep your balance. I’m not sure what will happen if Vivienne comes in, but you might be disoriented.”
Lord, I feel sick. “Please tell me you’ve done this before.”
“I haven’t,” he admits, his breath causing me to shiver as he briefly presses the tip of his nose against my neck.
“I feel like you should practice on someone else before me.”
“There’s no one else with as much potential as you, Kat. And besides, this is just practice. I don’t actually think she’ll come forth. We’ll need to wait until Samhain, when the veil is at the thinnest. That’s when we can conjure her on our own terms.”
“What are you wanting to ask her, anyway?”
A beat passes. I feel his breath on my hair. It makes me want to lean into him. I want him to touch me everywhere. “I want to know the truth.”
“I saw what you saw though. Have you seen any pictures of Vivienne? How do you know that the body in the hall is her or that she’s trying to communicate with you? Ghosts just scare people sometimes, don’t they?”
“And how many ghosts have you seen?”
“None,” I admit. “Unless you count the one I saw through your eyes.”
“That doesn’t count,” he says. “Now, close your eyes….”
“I’m wearing a blindfold,” I remind him.
“Close your eyes,” he says testily. “And imagine you’re in black emptiness. In the voids, the spaces between the veils where so many pass through.”
I see the place I was when he was trying to read my memories, the place where I stopped him and ran away. “I see it,” I whisper.
“Now, think of people you love who are gone. Think of your father. Those feelings will bring him to you.”
“I can bring my father to me this way?” I say, excitement flooding through me. I have so many questions to ask him. Forget about Vivienne Henry—I want to know the real reason my father made me keep my magic hidden. I want to tell him I love him. I want him to come back.
“I don’t know,” Crane says, his fingers strong on my shoulders. “See if you can. This is what the practice is for.”
I project myself inside that space. I think of my father, about seeing him again. I think of reaching out for him, grabbing him and pulling him into a hug. Of long nights spent by the fire, him reading from a book to me, feeling so much love.
But try as I might, he doesn’t materialize.
So then I try to think about Brom. I don’t know if Brom is dead or alive, but if he is dead, I want to see him again. I want to ask why he left. I want to know if he ever thought of me. I want to know what happened to him.
I picture him, the last night I saw him.
His face in the moonlight. How troubled he was.
How handsome. How good his hands felt on my body, how much pain he caused, but how that pain turned bittersweet.
How it changed me forever. How much power I gleaned from us, from our union.
How much I craved that connection again.
If you’re out there, Brom, let me find you, I think. Let me find you, please.
Crane’s grip on my shoulders tightens. “What are you doing?” he whispers.
But I can’t answer. All I can do is keep repeating those words and thinking of Brom and hoping he’ll lead me to him. Even if he’s still alive, maybe I can reach him this way.
Come home to me, Brom, I think.
“Kat,” Crane hisses. “What are you doing? What do you see? Don’t you feel that?”
It takes me a moment to process what Crane is saying. To realize that beyond this void, there is the real world.
But then I feel it too.
A dark, sinister power seeping into the void. Slowly, slowly, coming on hoofbeats that get louder and louder. Coming for us, coming for me.
And then it appears. A black horse leaps across the void, on its back a horseman with no head. It smells of decay and brimstone, and it’s coming to me, bringing with it a world of evil. A world where souls are trapped and screaming to die.
The horse gallops right up to me, and though the horseman has no head, I still feel its eyes. I feel it looking into my heart and soul.
It’s looking for something.
Someone.
But it isn’t me.
Then it abruptly turns, rears up, and gallops away, disappearing into the darkness.
And I’m falling backward into Crane’s arms, the blindfold ripped off my face as I’m placed on the cold ground, his hands tapping at my cheek.
“Kat! Kat, Katrina, Kat!”
My eyes fly open, and I stare up at Crane’s anguished face peering down at me.
“I don’t know what happened,” I manage to say. For some reason, it hurts to talk.
He puts his arms around my shoulders and helps me sit up, crouching beside me. “What did you see?”
I try to think, but it feels like moving through a swamp. “I don’t know. Something big and…bad. It was very bad. It was evil.”
A violent shiver rocks through me.
“I knew it! I had sensed it around us,” Crane says, talking fast, that excitable look in his eyes, like a mad scientist.
A mad mage, I think.
“I sensed it, and I knew it was being drawn to you. What happened? Did it get you, touch you?” He runs his hand over my cheek. It feels warm and full of life, and I close my eyes to it for a moment until he takes his hand away.
“It just stared at me. I can’t even tell you what it looked like anymore, but it looked at me, inside and out. Inside my soul. It looked at me, and it moved on.”
“You don’t feel it…hitched a ride somewhere inside you?”
I shake my head, though that gives me a splitting headache. “No. No, it left. Can’t you feel it did?”
He looks around for a moment, at the stars, at the dark lake, and nods. “Yes. It’s gone. Come on. Let’s get you up and get you home.”
“Get me home?” I ask as he lifts me to my feet.
“Mm-hmm,” he says, brushing a strand of hair off my face, my skin singing at his gentle touch. “I’m going with you.”