I wasn’t ready at all, but I climbed to my feet. “Yeah. Yeah, all right, let’s do this thing.”
CHAPTER 18
I had no idea why the cops weren’t coming down on us like a load of bricks. The flames, pushed to a bonfire, sent heat pouring over us. Everyone but me sang in a language I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure it was a real language, but after a few minutes of listening to the high, sweet tones, it didn’t matter. It was like Gregorian chants wrapped around wind chimes. Their voices got under my skin, lifting goose bumps. Faye’s soprano skirled up, pure enough to tangle with thin blue wood smoke, and dropped away again, leaving the air sharper and harder to breathe, like someone had brought a winter chill into the smoky summer air. Garth’s tenor matched her for a few notes, then was overrun by the Elder’s deep baritone.
Whistling, I thought, had nothing on this performance. I could feel what they were doing, all the way into my bones. Their singing had the same power as the drum, breaking down thought into the pure joy of sound. And, like the drum, it was meant to dilute the walls between the worlds, allowing the merely mortal to pass into the Upper and Lower Worlds. It made me gasp for air and grin at the fire while I struggled not to dance for the sheer delight of being alive. I leaned into the music, catching vowel sounds and carrying them up into the smoke, driven to participate without wanting to disrupt.
The six of us began by holding hands. We women had the symbols of the moon painted on our palms with sticky red that flared black in my wretched vision. The men stood between us, their own symbols—sword, scythe, skull—painted on their palms. When we joined hands, power spasmed through us, an electrical connection that lingered even after we stepped back from the fire. The other coven members joined us one at a time, taking up the empty spaces between our shoulders. Each new addition changed the power flow, a brisk shock that went through my body and pooled in unexpected places. I’d never thought about magic making a girl horny. Suddenly the reputed Wiccan practice of performing witchcraft “skyclad” sounded pretty entertaining.
Too bad, the irreverent and sane part of my mind said,that the garden Gary isn’t around.
It was too bad Gary wasn’t here, period. He would’ve loved the pageantry. I grinned, bumping my shoulders against the people next to me. I’d have to enjoy it for him, and tell him about it in the morning.
We made a tight circle around the fire.Ring around the rosy, I sang to myself, not wanting to interrupt the music the others still made. My feet had begun a bright, excited dance entirely of their own volition, and the coven as a whole circled the fire, crushing half steps closer to the flame.
Power built in its heart, a core of white expanding. I wanted to kneel down and touch it, but the under-the-skin ache of sunburn stopped me. My own powers, meant for healing or not, wouldn’t stop me from developing some lovely third-degree burns if I stuck my hand into a bonfire.
I was almost dancing in the fire now as it was, singing the few bright sounds I could anticipate. I closed my eyes, tilting my head back, and lifted my hands up toward the sky. The music made me feel like my feet were only bound to the ground by habit. I wondered if that was how Virissong felt: bound by time and habit to a world he fled to in hopes of saving his own. It was too late now; his world had been gone for eons.
For a moment, that thought seemed very important.
The coven’s song reached a crescendo, and ended.
Silence thundered in my ears, so loud my eyes flew open.
And my goddamned vision inverted again, the flames turning white with flickering gray cores. Blackened branches glowed crimson and white, the fire’s center bubbling a malicious, murky purple. I shook my head, trying to clear away the reversal of colors as I realized the song had been more than just music. It was a spell.
Power exploded upward.
It erupted from the heart of the fire, slamming into the atmosphere so hard it cracked the sky. Darkness boiled down from the stars, shredding the evening sky. Somebody screamed.
Things poured out of the darkness. They were pale, wraithlike, blues and grays and whites against a blackness so encompassing I couldn’t breathe. The fire was a single point of illumination, but even its colors were wrong, struggling through my reversed vision. Sheets of flat color ripped through the sky, like I imagined the aurora to look, only in grayscale or shades of purples and blues that seemed too deep. Spirits leaped from the colored sheets, in shapes and forms I had no frame of reference for. They were horrible, distorted and cruel, their faces pulled long to accommodate teeth meant for tearing and rending. They were neither human nor animal, and sometimes not even something in between. They taloned their hands, clutching at me, at the coven, then whisked away through the black power. They were made up of legends: names for some of them settled behind my ear bones, painfully intense knowledge that forced its way into the front of my mind. Stone giants calledNa-senee-ki-wakw; flint-winged monsters from the stars; mistai who haunted the dark and sad places.
They hated. Trapped for more time than I could comprehend, they only wanted to be free and to wreak destruction on a world that had rejected them. Panic surged up in my stomach, making me cold as I scrabbled for a foothold against them, anything that could help me build a wall and stop Hell from being unleashed on Earth. I had no support from the coven: they held fast, pulling the edges of darkness farther open. I spared one glance around the fire, hoping to find the desperation I felt in at least one face.
Instead, I found ecstasy.
Faye’s blond hair was strung out wildly, her mouth open and head flung back. Her skin glowed blue, as if she stood under black lights, her eyes dark pits and her open mouth swallowing down, or injecting, power. She looked like she was screaming, but her expression held fierce joy, not fear.
At the third point of the triangle, Marcia stood with her teeth bared, a terrible grimace distorting her face. But I could see and feel the power emanating from her; there was no rejection in her. From one face to another, I saw the same things. Even Garth, whose earnestness I had trusted, cried out in silent, joyful abandon, tears spilling down his cheeks.
I set my teeth together and prepared to dig down to the core of my being, and call up the power to stop this. There was a gut-level certainty in me: even if the earth itself were willing to share power with me, the effort would kill me. I wished, desperately, that I’d said goodbye to Gary.
And then, like Pandora’s Box, hope came.
Nothing outward changed: the silence still shrieked in my ears, the sky still boiled black. But theintent of the specters pouring out of the black hole we’d created seemed to change. The body-confused chill of sunburn swept up from my bones, making me shiver, making a bubble of sickness in my tummy. I swayed, and the boy next to me, more aware than I expected, put his hand under my elbow, supporting me. I glanced at him; his eyes shone with hope and excitement, even through my distorted vision.
Spirits like the ones who’d tumbled and mock-fought over Gary filled the sky. One caught my eye, a lion with tufts missing from his mane, and I wondered if the badger was nearby, carrying a tawny victory prize. More fantastical creatures, honochenokeh who were benevolent spirits; oni which had no visible form, but were life-force personified; other beings, some nearly human and some from pure legend, rolled out of the gap, chasing down their nightmare counterparts and disappearing into the sky. I looked for the thunderbird, and for Coyote, but saw neither of them in the mad rush. Even so, a sense of safety overwhelmed me.