I wished I felt as strong as I sounded. But, for whatever reason, it was important to me to soothe my father on that particular subject. He had long been a pawn in my mother’s intricate and selfish schemes. I would not let that pattern continue if I could stop it.
I disconnected after promising him that I would be very careful and instructed the televisual to contact my sister.
Darma’s pretty face swam into view almost immediately, as if she’d been waiting for the televisual’s summons. “Hello, Astra.”
Darma was older than me by five years. She had served as both sister and mother to me throughout my childhood. Since our real mother had led a busy and secretive life, which apparently hadn’t been entirely compatible with her role as a mother, Darma’s inclination toward mothering had worked out fine for everybody but me. She’d always felt she was within her rights to tell me how to live my life. And she’d always been dead set against the way I make my living.
Darma’s the sturdy, serious, dependable daughter. I’m the hotheaded, passionate and borderline psychotic spawn. I’m the dark side of a pairing between a devil and an angel. Darma is the cranky and all too serious but light side. She has no powers and, with her size nine feet resolutely planted on
terra firma
, she appears to have a severe allergy to all things unearthly and magical. I think she must have been adopted but my parents won’t admit it.
However, at the moment, she bore a startling resemblance to my father as she tilted her red-blonde head at me and frowned slightly. “What have you gotten yourself into this time, Astra?”
I took a mental deep breath and smiled at her. “It’s nice to see you too, Darma.”
This only deepened the frown. But she said nothing more, apparently waiting for me to open my mouth and seal my own fate. Her judgment awaited.
“I just wanted to say hello and see how you were, sister. We haven’t spoken in a while.”
The frown turned into a scowl. “Mmm-hmm.”
“And… I wanted to find out if you’d spoken to Mother lately.”
The scowl deepened. “You aren’t cavorting with her and her playmates are you, Astra? That would be serious bad news.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t spoken to Mother for three years. But everybody is suddenly telling me to stay away from her.”
Darma’s face relaxed just a titch. “Good advice. I’d take it if I were you.”
But you aren’t me are you Darma?
I couldn’t help the wayward thought.
The scowl returned. “Who has been warning you against Mother?”
I paused, reluctant to tell her about my visitation from Aunt Deirdre. I knew she wouldn’t take it well. “Father for one and my angel…”
I thought that might be enough to satisfy her but, with her usual astuteness, Darma read the exclusion of information somewhere on my face.
“And?”
Damn! I was gonna have to work on my blank face.
I sighed, not bothering to try to hide my reluctance from her. There was obviously no point. If I didn’t know for a fact that she had no powers I would think she could read my mind. “Aunt Deirdre visited me in a dream.”
Darma jumped as if goosed and I felt compelled to go on in a fruitless effort to stanch the torrent of verbal abuse I was sure was coming my way. “She visited Father too.”
That did give her pause. She glared at me through hostile blue eyes for a long beat and then, amazingly, she sighed and seemed to deflate a bit. “What did she say?”
“I…she…we…” I stammered. I was so shocked by her lack of reaction that I found my brain and tongue wouldn’t function together.
Aside from being earthbound and practical to a fault, my older sister was also
not
the most patient of creatures. “Spit it out, Astra. My holy savior! What is wrong with you today?”
Her familiar crankiness ripped me out of my dazed state. “She’s worried that Mother will attempt to pull me into whatever dastardly deeds she’s currently involved in.”
Darma nodded as if she were not surprised. I suddenly wondered if she was. “Darma
have
you spoken to Mother lately?”
Her response was too careful. Too composed.
“No I haven’t, Astra. The last time I saw her was totally by chance. I ran into her about a month ago, in a restaurant downtown at midday. She was with some filthy Satanist. We barely spoke.”
I tilted my head at her. “A Satanist? Are you sure? Did he have the tattoos?”
Darma seemed to realize she’d told me more than she wanted to and tried to shrug nonchalantly. But the shrug was a bit too jerky to be nonchalant. “Not that I could see.”
Alarm crawled up my spine like a slimy supra demon. “Then how did you know he was a Satanist?”
Now she looked decidedly uncomfortable. “I have to go, Astra.” And she just…hung up!
Chapter Eight
Dastardly Deeds
The demon bent to do its worst, his thoughts on making hay,
With zest our demon slayer zapped, his willingness to play.
The Viper dropped silently into hover in a field at the edge of dense, night painted woods. I experienced a sense of déjà vu as my dream from the previous night lurked in my mind. I looked up at the sky as I emerged from the Viper and saw the same strange ribbons of clouds skittering rapidly over the same fat moon. I shivered, causing Emo, who had come up beside me and was tucking a long, slim knife into a band he wore around his arm, to look at me and cock his head. “You okay, boss?”
I raised my eyebrows at him and gave him a brisk nod. “Let’s get this over with.”
I could feel my partner watching me as I left the relative brightness of the open field and forced myself into the trees. I knew as soon as I entered the woods that something was not right there. Evil tainted the air like a bad smell, coating everything under those trees and bringing the hairs up on my arms like static electricity.
I felt Emo as he joined me and turned to him. The light of the obese moon came through the trees in wimpy strings that painted Emo’s gorgeous golden face in soft stripes. It was hard to get a bead on his emotions through the striping affect but I saw the red flame in the center of each eye that told me he was more than wary.
As if to punctuate my thought, Emo shuffled my mental drawers and said,
There’s something bad building here, Astra. I don’t like it.
I stared into his shadowed face for a beat and then said,
I feel it too. Stay close. We might need to fight our way out of here.
Almost simultaneously we reached for our knives and started off again, following the trail of evil to the spot that I could picture in my mind. The spot where my Aunt Deirdre and I had had our little moonlight chat. I now knew that my dream had been more than a visitation, it had also been prophecy.
As I retraced my steps from my dream, the air around us became gradually more charged until I could feel my hair moving away from my head and a random touch brought sparks that stung and spat in the cool night air.
Malevolent breezes moved through the trees and swayed against us, not like normal wind, which touches you and then moves on but like a disembodied presence, which winds softly around you and then pulses away, only to return as if drawn to the light in your soul.
There was something more in the wind too. Something that made my stomach clutch and caused sweat to bead against my upper lip.
I took deep breaths against the need to escape that caressing, invasive wind and risked a glance at my partner. One look at his face told me all I needed to know. The air was filled with more than evil.
It had sexual heat too.
It was at that moment that I smelled it, the primordial musk that was the human sexual experience. And I knew. Black rites were being performed, with sex as power. I was both disgusted and relieved. At least it wasn’t the blackest of magic rites, which used human sacrifice.
But this could be almost as bad. Especially if the victim were unwilling, or worse, a virgin. Some cultists used only virgin sacrifices for these rites. And I was praying my friend Raoul wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive him for that.
I could feel the woods thinning and knew we were getting close. I stopped and Emo ran into the back of me, nearly panting in my ear. I turned to glare at him but he just shrugged.
I jumped as the tree next to me moved. But then realized it was just moving in the building wind.
It wasn’t a natural wind.
For the last several minutes my mind had been registering a booming sound on an almost subconscious level. I had been processing it as if it were thunder and kept looking up to the sky. But as we stood near the edge of the clearing where I was now certain the black rites were being performed, I suddenly realized that what I had been hearing was chanting. The sound bounced off the dense vegetation in a way that amplified it out of proportion, creating a general feeling of being larger than life and making it darker even than I knew it to be.
I took a deep breath and reached out with my aura. The magic in the air tangled with my senses for a moment and I had to struggle to push past it. But once clear of the cloaking magic in that clearing, I got a general sense of humans, dozens of them, in various states of magic intoxication.
I opened my eyes and looked at Emo. Sometime in the last few seconds he’d moved closer to me and was now standing a mere breath away. His eyes were dark pools of black velvet, touched in the center by a tiny red flame that now flickered softly in the building magic. I sensed his need to touch and be touched and, just for a moment, I felt myself swaying toward him, my eyes closing and my lips tingling in anticipation.
Just before our lips met I felt his hand at my waist and heard him sigh. My body pulsed suddenly with need and I very nearly gave in to it. But a thought passed through my mind that extinguished the rampant sexual feelings like ice water poured on a candle.
This was my friend and partner and we were only reacting to the sexual heat that was coming off the rites in that clearing. If we touched each other at that moment it would ruin our friendship for all time. I jerked away from him before his lips could touch mine.
He opened his mouth as if to object but I shook my head and turned away.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the clearing. What I saw there wiped any feelings of regret right out of my mind.
The clearing was nearly filled with bodies. The participants wore rough, hooded robes in dark colors, their faces and most of their bodies obscured. They were crowded together around something in the center of the clearing and their bodies swayed as if enchanted. The deep rumble of their chanting pulsed and vibrated the air around us.
I felt Emo join me but didn’t turn to look at him. I didn’t want to know what was in his eyes at that moment.
The scene before me was blurred by something, as if I were looking through steamed or filmed glass. I blinked to clear my vision but when I opened them again the scene was still blurry.
I wondered if something was happening to my eyesight but then my mind registered movement in the air above the swaying witches and, with a jolt of understanding, I realized what I was seeing.
Spirits, possibly hundreds of them, hung above the proceedings in that clearing. Adding their energy to the rites and pulsing with intoxication from the energy coming off the sexual rite.
If I squinted I could just make out ghostly faces in the cloudy air above the crowd and human forms that seemed to be unclothed.
I stood rooted to the spot. I was afraid to move because, with my powers, I tended to draw spiritual attention even when I didn’t want it.
Emo touched my arm and I turned my head to look at him. He nodded once and I looked in the direction he’d indicated.
A single form in a long, black robe stood just outside the circle, head thrown back and arms raised high. He stood on a raised platform of rock, towering above the gathered group of black worshipers.
I couldn’t see his face but I knew he was chanting something that was bringing the spirits forward to enhance the energy level. I couldn’t help wondering what he was generating all of the power for.
As I had the thought it was as if the figure on the rock platform heard me. The shadowed face turned in my direction and his arms dropped a fraction, as if he’d momentarily lost focus. I could have sworn I saw him jerk in surprise.
But he quickly recovered and raised his arms even higher, increasing the volume of his chanting until I could hear him above all the rest. My heart thundered in my chest. I recognized that voice.
The renewed vigor of Raoul’s chanting caused the spirits in that clearing to roil and twist and push against the dark celebrants. Robed figures in the circle jerked and pantomimed distress as they became only slightly willing vessels for the frantic spirits.
One by one they dropped to the ground and fell upon one another.
I was startled into taking a step forward, thinking that they were going to harm each other and realizing that Raoul would have to live with those results for the rest of his life.
Somehow I felt responsible for his current state of mind. Maybe I had pushed him too hard. Maybe my insistence that he spy on the coven for me was to blame. Whatever had brought him to this low point, I felt it was my duty as his friend to help him get beyond it.
I quickly realized though that the writhing figures on the ground were not trying to kill each other. When the first pair of robes hit the dirt…minus the witches who had been wearing them…my face turned a blazing shade of red and I started to turn away. I would wait for Raoul in the woods. No reason I needed to watch a bunch of horny spirits party hearty using the flesh of a bunch of willing witches.
But before I could take three steps toward the woods the air pulsed once in a sort of sonic boom and then a backwash of electrically charged air that smelled of the deepest kind of evil blew outward, away from the center of the clearing and hit the line of trees that surrounded the space, causing them to bend backward almost to the breaking point.