My breath caught. At the Witches’ Ball, before I told the lucusi I was the Lustrata, I had a vision of Hecate. She had said, “You will find Me in the darkness. In your darkness. I am there. When you are ready to see your own soul . . . I’ll be waiting.”
As my fingers scrubbed along the chilled, damp wall, my toes slid cautiously forward. My progress was slow, but certain. A dozen paces in, my heart leaped as I felt no floor before me. Crouching to inspect, I felt nothing.
My first thought was to go back. But I knew that I could not choose between Menessos and Johnny. This was ridiculous. My path was not a dead end. Was not a path into darkness that led to a bottomless pit. It couldn’t be. I was the Lustrata. I was the bringer of light and justice. Light. Lustrata implied luster, a glowing sheen.
The mantle!
Calling my armor, calling on the light, that gentle gleam brightened the area around me. Little by little, a vast cavern appeared, a place giants—Titans—had carved into the foundation of the earth. I stood atop a grand stairway, each step five-feet high and thirty feet wide. Pillars stood like skyscrapers across the endless hall before me.
Crouching on the edge, I leaped down, step after step, and counted thirteen in all.
I lingered on the last. Stalactites dotted the ceiling between the enormous pillars, and their companion stalagmites disrupted the floor below. I searched to define a path. Feeling rather like a mouse in the Titan’s house, and wary that there might be a giant cat waiting to pounce, I peered into the distance before easing down.
My feet did not scrape over more stone, but struck wood.
I dropped to the ground. Here, at the foot of the giant stone stairway, was a wide arched door that looked like a cartoon mouse might live behind it—if the mouse were tall as a human. Have to be careful what you’re thinking in here.
The vast hall was an expanse of rock except for a single human-sized door. That made for an easy decision of what to do next.
I pushed the knobless door and it gave with a groan. As I passed through, I emerged into the night. This wasn’t the lake area. I stood on solid, dry earth topped with fall’s dry grass brittle under my feet. The door was attached to a giant—no, I’ll use that word sparingly now—a mature elm tree. It stretched up like a black silhouette, leaves unnaturally still.
As I brought my focus down from the limbs, I checked the sky for a clue to my location. The night was moonless. None of the constellations were ones I could name. The sky didn’t help me at all.
Then the aroma of raisin and currant cakes filled my nostrils. A dirt road stretched before me. I stepped onto the path. Perhaps a dozen yards ahead, two more roads joined it. One on either side. In the center where the three roads intersected, stood an old woman robed in black, face hidden in the depths of a hood. She grasped the handles protruding from the curved shaft of a scythe. The blade’s tip rested on the dirt. Hecate of the Crossroads.
“You have come,” she said in the voice of Time Eternal, the voice of the Depths of Nothing and Everything, the voice of The Crone.
Leaving the elm behind, I asked, “Do I have to see my own soul?”
“Only if you want control over what pieces of it you share.”
I stopped about ten feet away from Her. She was armed, after all. I hoped She didn’t actually take part in this ritual and cut away pieces of souls with that scythe. It didn’t look very precise. Or sanitary. “What’s the risk if I don’t?”
She shrugged Her bent shoulders. “You may have your choice or your desire.”
Choice or desire? Sounded redundant, as if they should be the same thing, but I knew they were not. If asked to make a choice, people had to consider the possibilities. If given their desire, it might reflect a base, instinctual need without conscious thought attached to that selection.
I respected Johnny’s concern not to have us in his head. That encouraged me to pick choice, so he could decide what he shared.
If Menessos had that same opportunity to choose what to share and what not . . . it could be far more dangerous. And yet, letting his desire take some piece of my soul didn’t sound like the best option, either.
The root question was: do I trust my mind and heart to decide what was best, or my subconscious?
“Now I know why Una didn’t want to do this,” I muttered.
“Why do you utter such?”
“One I would give his choice. The other . . . is hard to trust with either option.”
The old woman laughed. “Why do you trust Menessos less?”
“I didn’t say it was him.”
“You don’t have to.”
Fine. “He would know better than Johnny or me how to manipulate the situation to his gain.”
“Has his gain been so unkind to you?”
“No.”
“Then decide which gift you give him.”
Choice or desire. Both. “I will allow Johnny to take what he desires, but I will choose what Menessos receives.”
“So it will be done. Come, child, and kneel before me.”
Even though She had chosen me to be the Lustrata, getting that close to the armed Crone was unsettling. Still, I could not refuse. I walked forward and knelt before Her, naked except for the Lustrata’s mantle.
Instantly She was in motion, Her age-spotted and gnarled hands swirling the scythe in overhead arcs and wide sweeping motions. The blade whistled as it sliced the air; the wind of the motion stirred my hair. I didn’t flinch, but pondered Her face, hidden in the dark of Her hood. Her eyes, I remembered, were haunting.
Suddenly, Hecate cried out and the scythe point embedded in the ground before me, so the widest part of the blade was waist high. “Cast your eyes upon this blade!” She commanded. Her hood fluttered and fell back, exposing Her wrinkled face, loosening gray hair, and terrible eyes that had stared into the sun for eons. “Stare into the silver and see your own soul.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
I peered at the blade, but saw nothing. No reflection at all.
Where am I?
My hands rose to the blade, to be sure it was real, and that the angle was right. The surface was shiny enough . . .
The side of my finger skimmed along a fraction of the keen blade. Pain sliced as my skin split. I jerked away. A single glistening drop of too-red blood ran slowly down the razor edge. The shiny blade shimmered and there I was, appearing surprised in my reflection. Then my image faded like smoke.
What remained glowed softly, nearly invisible, a stereotypical ghost from the movies. Yet my senses overloaded at the sight. My mind went strange, as if perception had become tactile. My skin could see. I observed all that was around me at once. What was my previous sense of vision now examined the surface of the blade as if with intangible fingers. Tentacles? No, more like arcs of electrical current, searching, feeling, discerning with energy. The blade felt like radio static.
For one perfect moment, my awareness was redefined as a gentle light that surrounded me, as heavy as a knight’s armor yet nebulous as a cloud. It permeated my skin and my aura. It pulsed with energy like a venous system filled with a lifetime of flowing memories rather than blood. All that made me the person I was, created this synthesis.
My soul!
The revelation was astounding, amazing, and so vivid that—
I blinked and it severed me from this place.
No! I’m not done—
I was free-falling, rushing back into myself with break-the-sound-barrier speed.
I wanted Menessos to have my first memory of the Goddess. So he would know why I was in that cornfield, why I was running. And so he would know the comfort and solace that found me and changed my life forever . . .