“So I may be purified and travel to the Crystal world,” I repeat.
Sister K squeezes my hands, then releases them with a smile. “It is time.”
M’s wooden spoon descends into the thick, bubbling, brown-yellow depths. My stomach rolls as she scoops them out into the crystal goblet the other M is holding.
M holds it out to me, smiling. “Here you are, dearie.”
I take the goblet, feeling a little like Snow White accepting the poisoned apple from the crone, only this isn’t even a poisoned apple…it’s just the poison. I grimace, bringing the goblet to my lips. Hot, moist fumes lick my cheeks.
Here we go. No one can accuse me of not loving my fam!
My friends wanted to take me clubbing but no, here I am, back home, doing this…
I drink it. And no, I’m not going to explain what it tastes like because no one needs nightmare fuel like that lurking around in the backs of their minds and I don’t need something like that on my conscience. All you need to know is, I feel so bad after that one sip that the sisters have to catch me and carry me over to the log.
“Oh God,” I cry. I’ve eaten N and N’s cooking before. Eaten it and
survived
. So why was my vision getting all wonky?
I stumble.
“I think it’s taking affect,” Kiki whispers.
What’s taking affect?
I frown. Open my mouth. “D-did you put something in my drink?”
“Nothing but sacred herbs,” the M’s tell me.
Damn, these are some seriously
strong
sacred herbs.
Agent X glances behind us. “We need to get her to the cave.”
Cave? CAVE???
Moaning, I lean back and stare into what could be described as a cave…but could also be described as the gateway to the abyss. Icicle-like stones hang from the cave’s ceiling. Water drips from them, splashing onto the rocky floor. And beyond that? Impenetrable darkness.
First thought:
That cave shit was literal? No way was I going in there!
Second thought:
How the hell did I not see that gigantic, gaping cave when I first got up here?
“Come on, sisters,” Agent X grunts, grabbing my shoulders and lifting me up. The other sisters grab my legs. My own mother takes my hand and gives me a squeeze, smiling. “Oh sweetie, I’m so proud of you!”
Proud of me? For what? Stomaching N and N’s cooking? Climbing up a mountain? I don’t need your pride right now, mom! I need you to help me get the hell out of here!
“No!” I cry. “I’m not going in there! Why can’t…his crystal spirit thing…come out here?”
“Because he’s been asleep for over a thousand years,” M says.
“And his body has been severed,” the other M continues.
I’m suddenly very, very worried that Crystal Jesus might actually be a mummy. A mummy they want to dump my weak, drugged body next to.
A mummy they want me to marry.
I shut my eyes and scream, “Fuck Crystal Jesus! I want out!”
Kiki’s wobbly face frowns. “Crystal Jesus?”
M grins. “She already has a pet name for our crystal savior!”
“And she already wants to fuck him, too!” the other M cheers.
I want to tell them that I have no desire to have sex with Crystal Jesus, but I’m too stunned to respond. One of the M’s just uttered the word
fuck
.
They resume moving me towards the cave. Freezing air gushes from the entrance, re-igniting my passion to get the hell out of here. If only I didn’t feel like I was a sloppy drunk about to pass out!
“Do not fret, Rainbow,” Kiki whispers. “Your purity shall set the world right again.”
“Purity?” I slur. “I’m not pure.”
Kiki frowns. “What do you mean? You wear the promise ring.”
Again with the ring! I rue the day I picked this ring out of the box in the Crystal chapel.
Rue it!
“Um, yeah. About that…” I mutter.
Kiki’s eyes go wide. “Do you mean to suggest that you’re no longer a virgin?”
That is absolutely what I mean to suggest
. Luckily, I don’t have to say those words out loud. My hot, red,
kill-me-now!
face does the job for me.
N and N drop my feet. Kiki gasps. My own mother—who, by the way, had me
out of wedlock
—looks at me like I’m a harlot.
Oh god. This was a conversation I never wanted to have with the sisters, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. “Look, I fell in love. It didn’t work out, alright? But…it meant something to me, unlike this fake Crystal Jesus bullshit. I’m not going to save myself for someone who doesn’t exist!”
The sisters don’t take this revelation well.
“Oh!” M cries out. “The sacred crystal has been defiled—nay,
shattered
!”
Sacred crystal shattered?
What a messed-up metaphor for losing one’s virginity.
The other M’s head whips around as she searches the mountain top, like there might be a random dude up here somewhere, and (because, apparently, doing the deed with
one guy
means I have zero standards), I am gonna jump his bones in front of all of them. “Get her to the cave, quick!”
“Stop this nonsense, all of you! It doesn’t matter!” Agent X hisses.
“But the prophecy!” Kiki laments
“The prophecy says nothing about virginity,” Agent X continues. “Virginity means nothing. I had ten lovers before I joined the Order of the Crystal.”
What? Really? Way to go Agent X!
“It is not the body that must be pure, but the heart. And Rainbow has the purest heart I have ever encountered,” she finishes.
Oh man, I would be so touched right now if I weren’t about to be sacrificed to Crystal Jesus!
A drop of water lands on the tip of my nose.
I glance to my left and my right. Cold darkness surrounds me.
We’re in the cave. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know I’m running out of time.
I clench my hands into fists and kick my legs, or at least try to. With every second that passes I lose more strength. Pretty soon I’m just breathing heavily and gnashing my teeth.
“Don’t fight it,” my mother whispers. “It will be so much easier if you just let go.”
“No shit it will be easier!” I groan. “Sorry to make it more difficult for you to kill me!”
“We’re not trying to kill you. We’re trying to heal the crystal,” Kiki tells me.
“Crystals are rocks. Rocks do not need healing. Rocks do not feel anything. I feel a lot, and right now I’m feeling pissed! LET ME GO!”
“Almost there,” Agent X groans.
I’m suddenly very happy I’m such a large woman, because they’re all going to have sore backs for the next few days. And they totally deserve it for drugging me and carrying me off into a mummy cave!
Alright, there’s actually nothing for me to be happy about.
The cave’s darkness swallows the sister’s features. They became what I feel—bony fingers, groaning voices, and a sharp, panicking fear so strong it cut through the drug’s sleepy lull. Those bony fingers dig into my body as they set me down. The groans get louder. When my back hits the stone alter, panic consumes me.
The sisters begin to chant in Latin. Their voices are low whispers, so different than their usually cheery tone. I can barely recognize them.
“MOM!” I scream, sounding like a child instead of a woman. “Don’t do this!”
The sister’s voices bleed into each other.
“I love you, Rainbow. Be strong and trust yourself,” my mother whispers, squeezing my hand. I squeeze her hand back. Maybe it’s stupid, but I want to hold onto something and it’s the only thing here that feels familiar. I know it’s sick, because she was complicit in all of this, but I want to believe she isn’t. Even though it’s foolish, I want to pretend this isn’t really happening.
The chanting echoes in my ears. Something grabs hold of my mind and pulling me towards it.
Let go
, it whispers, but I don’t want to let go. I don’t want it to take me!
“No!” I cry out, and then my hand is grasping air. My mother is no longer holding me. She’s abandoned me. I’m alone. “No!”
The chanting gets nauseatingly loud, as if the sisters are screaming in my ears. I scream, too, until my voice drowns all of theirs out. For one second, there’s a flash of brilliant, white light.
Then, everything goes black.
Chapter 2
I blink.
My head’s aching something fierce. I groan and reach for the aspirin I leave on my bedside table.
My fingers hit something that feels like solid rock.
What the hell?
I open my eyes.
Wait, it
is
solid rock!
I blink again.
I’m in a cave.
I shoot up.
Why am I in a cave?!?!?
And then it all comes back to me. How my mother and the women who raised me dragged me up a mountain, drugged me, and then threw my half conscious body in a cave. I wrap my arms around my chest, shivering. “Mom?” I yell. “Sisters?”
There’s no answer but the howling wind at the cave’s entrance.
They left me here. To die.
I glance at the stone altar the sisters placed me on.
Well, at least there’s no mummy.
My relief is short-lived, for the howling wind makes me jump.
I shut my eyes and take a deep breath.
Oh man, this is so pathetic
. A grown woman, afraid of…being abandoned in a cave in the middle of nowhere…
Alright, that sounds a little less pathetic. Still, I need to get over it.
It’s okay, Rainbow. It’s just nature. Wild, untamed nature. It’s not like wild untanned nature is something to be scared of. Flowers are natural. Sunshine is natural.
And so are sharks, and bears, and wolves, and killer bees, and…
My eyes whip open. I need to stop this and get out of here. The sisters were so going to get it. I can’t believe they did this to me! I stumble to the cave’s entrance, one hand messaging my pounding temples, the other out in front of me in case I did a face-plant. Damn, why were there so many rocks and…
I look down, right into the dark eye sockets of a monstrous beast.
Oh my god. Those are not rocks.
They are bones.
Freaking DINOSAUR bones.
Or at least I hope they’re dinosaur bones, because dinosaurs have been extinct for a long-ass time and if they aren’t dinosaurs, then I’ve woken up in some epic fantasy world filled with…
No. Not even gonna entertain that thought. I am going to walk right out of this cave, into the sunshine, go down the mountain, yell at the sisters, disown my mother, and then pack my shit and take the first plane out of here. First step: hauling ass to the mouth of the cave. Which is exactly what I do as I do my best to pretend like the crunching sounds were something other than my feet breaking apart freaky mythological bones.
I reach the entrance to the cave and look at the brilliant glory of the setting sun. Then, I look a little further down.
I stop moving. Stop breathing. Don’t do anything but
stare
.
Rainbow…
The mountain is red like the first color of the rainbow. The cave I’m in is not made of rock, but bloodstone and rubies. And it isn’t the only part of this strange world that glitters like a crystal.
Rainbow…!
The landscape is like a rainbow. A glittering, horrifically beautiful rainbow. The marshes and lowlands are the color of Peridot and moss agates. A large yellow tower shoots out of a citrine desert. Carnelian fields. An Aquamarine and turquoise seascape. And far off in the distance, ominous amethyst mountains shoot into the sky, their tops disappearing into mist.
What is this, Lisa Frank World?
“RAINBOW!”
I shriek, shooting back.
Where did that voice come from?
There’s a soft, pixie-like chuckle. “Finally, I got your attention.”
I look around. “Where the hell are you?”
“Down here!”
I glance down.
Oh no.
Oh dear God no.
There’s a dinosaur skull tied to a stick. Long, sharp teeth erupt from its majestic snout. Its black, hollow sockets seem to track me. I could feel it watching, assessing, waiting for the right moment to…
Alright. A skull on its own couldn’t really do much. But still.
It was freaking talking to me!
“Rub me,” the dinosaur whispers.
WTF?
“
Rub
you?”
“Yes. Set me free. It’s time for us to finally meet.”
I stare at creepy,
chatty
dinosaur head. The last thing I want to do is unleash the genie that lives inside it. “What if I don’t want us to meet?”
There’s a sniffle. “You don’t want to meet me?”
“No. I don’t. I
really
don’t.”
And I don’t think anything you could say would change my mind.
And then, the little asshole says something that will change my mind. “You have to let me out if you want to go home.”
Damn, he knows my weakness! I cross my arms over my chest. “Alright, I’m listening.”
“You’ve realized that you’re not in your world anymore, haven’t you?”
I glance at the glittering, crystal landscape. “Some things have changed.”
“You’re in the Land of Sacred Crystals.”
I think I’m in the land of hallucination. What the hell did N and N put in that drink? “This isn’t real,” I tell the dinosaur skull.
“Oh, it’s real alright,” creepy perv dinosaur says, his normally cheery voice descending a few octaves. “More real than you can imagine. You can die here, if your heart is broken. Or, if your heart gets too attached to this land, you may never return to your own world. And the prince you’re here to save is even more fragile than you are, though he may seem strong.”
I have no idea what the dinosaur is talking about. But dying? Yeah, I don’t want that. “Okay. That’s nice and all, but how do I get out of here?”
“First…you must rub me.”
Oh God, did he have to keep saying ‘rub me’ like
that?
I suppress a shudder. “How do I know you’re telling the truth about all this?”
And you don’t just want an excuse to get me to rub you?