I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could get a word out, I felt Helen’s hand on my arm. I looked over my shoulder, and she was shaking her head.
I nodded and remained silent.
“Felicity,” Helen began. “I want you to move forward in time. You were teaching your class, and by all accounts, you had some type of seizure.”
“Yes,” Felicity replied, calmly switching the subject. “The class was about Dark Moon magick, and I was going over one of my favorite Dorothy Morrison spells with the group. I had just recited the last line where you call to the Crone of Darkness and ask her to allow you to feel the unseen an…”
Her words ended without warning. No stutter, no sound, no nothing. They simply halted mid-breath, leaving an expectant silence in their wake.
“Go on, Felicity,” Helen prompted. “It is okay. Just tell us what you remember.”
My wife’s head tilted forward, slowly at first and then simply fell as if she’d lost consciousness. As her chin touched her chest, her head lolled to the side, and she creased her brow in a display of pain. She rolled her head back upward and allowed it to tilt back, bringing her face up toward the ceiling, then let out a heavy breath.
“Jesus I hurt.” The words came out of Felicity’s mouth, but the voice was completely unfamiliar.
I turned a hard stare back to Helen and she held up her hand, motioning for me to wait.
“Felicity?” she asked.
I turned back to my wife and watched as she blinked her eyes several times.
The voice came again, louder and defiant. “What, you can’t turn on the goddamned lights around here?”
She grimaced visibly and then ran the tip of her tongue across her teeth.
“Fuck,” she said. “My tooth’s broke.”
I felt a sudden closeness and looked up to find that Ben and Constance had moved into the room with us and were watching intently.
“Larson got hit in the mouth,” Ben whispered, then canted his head toward Felicity. “Is she doin’ what I think she is?”
“If you mean is she channeling Brittany Larson,” I returned, “yeah, I think she is.”
I shot another glance toward Helen and then turned back to Felicity. I knew something hadn’t felt right about all of this, and now that feeling was starting to get worse. Much worse.
My wife’s hands were resting on the arms of the chair, and she began to physically jerk and tug as if trying to lift them, but they barely moved. She rotated her wrists as she struggled- stretching her fingers outward and then doubling them back into fists. She pushed herself slightly forward and twisted her shoulders while wriggling in her seat, groaning as she pulled against the unseen bonds. No matter how hard she tried, her forearms remained planted on the rests as if they were actually tied there. She finally let herself fall back into the seat and let out a frustrated shriek.
“Fucking asshole!” the voice burst from her lips as a defiant shout. “Do you have any idea who I am?!”
“Jeezus,” Ben muttered. “She’s got a pair.”
Felicity suddenly jerked her head to the side, pulling it away from something unseen as she sent her eyes searching.
“Don’t you touch me,” the voice growled. “My father is goddamned Mayor you idiot. Every fucking cop in the state is probably looking for me right now.”
Her head jerked backward, and her jaw clenched as her neck began to stretch. A nasal whine came from her nose amid the sound of her choking.
“Bring her back,” I demanded, whipping around to face Helen. “Now.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I think so. Felicity, return.”
My wife’s head instantly fell forward then began to slowly tilt back upward. Her chest rose with a deep breath and then settled into her earlier relaxed rhythm. Once again her face was slack.
“No,” she said after a moment, her own voice issuing from her lips.
“One… Two…” Helen began counting.
“No,” Felicity spoke again, sharpness in her tone. “Not yet. I can’t remember it all.”
“…Five… Six…”
“NO,” my wife insisted, still staring off into space. “We have to know where she is.”
“…Nine…” Helen continued.
“NO!” Felicity barked. “I have to go back. I have to…”
She finished the sentence with an agonized cry, which caught in her throat only to be cut off mid scream. Her face suddenly contorted into a pained grimace as her body stiffened, and her hands began posturing inward.
The room filled with the sound of arcing electricity as it started to buzz and snap, and at the exact instant of the first pop, I felt the ethereal defenses I had erected begin falling away. Upon the second, they collapsed inward upon themselves as if caught in a gale force wind.
“RETURN,” Helen announced once again, this time with far more urgency.
Blind agony hammered me between the eyes, and I blinked back tears as it screwed inward toward the center of my brain. I felt my own motor control begin to slip as I flopped sideways, almost falling from the armless chair in which I was seated. Something grappled my shoulder in a tight hold, and I looked up to see Ben steadying me.
“Twilight Zone?” His words rushed past me in a distorted stream and then began repeating in a hollow echo.
A heavy bass thrum droned inside my head as I reached up with trembling hands in an attempt to contain my exploding skull. I shut my eyes tight and tried to will it away. The one clear thought that kept running through my mind was just let me die.
“ROWAN!” Ben’s voice struck my ears again, forcing their way through the heavy metal crescendo that was building in my brain.
“FELICITY! RETURN!” I heard Helen’s voice again, and it was edging toward frantic. “RETURN!”
Helen Storm was the calmest, most even-tempered person I had ever met. She didn’t get frantic.
Now I was frightened.
“Oh my god!” Agent Mandalay’s voice joined the jumble of noises. “Felicity!”
I pitched forward and forced myself to open my eyes. My wife was in the full throes of a seizure; her face was a horrid mask of pain as she shook uncontrollably, gnashing her teeth into her tongue. Pinkish froth was running from the corner of her mouth, and she bucked hard against unearthly restraints. However, that was but one of the torturous images to greet me.
Small, circular wounds had appeared randomly along her bare forearms. They were red and blistered. Oozing and charred. I’d seen pictures of wounds just like them in a brochure from a local women’s shelter. The information was about spousal abuse, and the photos were of cigarette burns.
A linear splash of blood suddenly appeared on Felicity’s t-shirt just across her left breast, spreading outward as it soaked into the cloth. I watched in horror as yet another burn mark sizzled into view on the back of her hand, appearing right before my eyes.
“JEEZUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!” Ben was yelling. “Helen! Do something!”
“She isn’t responding!” Helen returned. “She is pushing herself into it on purpose!”
I was struggling to maintain my own connection with this world, and the visual horror of the torture my wife was now going through only steeled my resolve. I forced a tenuous ground to form once again between the earth and me in an attempt to rebuild my shattered defenses. But, even as I connected, I could feel it making and breaking in a vicious cycle.
Fear was boring upward from the pit of my stomach as I fought simply to keep from slipping any further across the veil myself. I didn’t want to think about how far this could go, but my brain rifled through the scenarios anyway. I was intimately familiar with the dangers that came along with channeling those on the other side. At this very moment, each and every one of them was present and accounted for. And, leading the pack, as always, was Cerridwen. The Dark Mother, Goddess of death and rebirth. A deity to whom I had called out on many a Samhain night when celebrating the lives of loved ones long past.