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  Natalie pushed me aside, he thought, trembling, she pushed me aside and took the hit for me.

  The force of the impact had sent Natalie into the brick wall that had previously blocked them their escape. He rushed to her side, threw himself to the ground, and checked for her pulse. It was there, but it was weak.

  “Natalie,” he said, tapping her soft face, “Fuck, Natalie!”

  But Natalie wouldn’t wake. Was she concussed? He checked the back of her head but couldn’t feel any blood. That didn’t mean she wasn’t concussed, though, only that she wasn’t bleeding. It was some kind of consolation, but not much. Seeing her lying on the ground, unconscious, skin pale, lips slightly parted, twisted his gut into a knot and made him go cold.

  This was my fault.

  He craned his head around, remembering he had been on the phone to Lily, and saw the phone on the ground only by the brightness of the display. He laid Natalie’s head gently on the ground, dashed across the alley for his phone, and slammed it against his ear.

  “Lily?” he said, panting, “Are you there?”

  “Oh my God, Damien, what the fuck just happened?” she asked.

  “You need to come and get us,” Damien said, struggling to find the words, “Natalie’s been hurt. She’s unconscious, I don’t think she’s bleeding, but she took a big hit and she’s—fuck, Lily—I think she just saved my life.”

  Chapter Three

  She was starting to go cold. Despite the coat and the scarf and the gloves, Natalie’s hands were freezing cold, and the feel of her skin was continuing to twist Damien’s stomach, wringing it out like a wet rag. How could this have happened? Why did this happen? Where had that warlock come from, and what had he done to Natalie?

  The questions came at him fast like rapid heartbeats, but he couldn’t answer them. He had to pick Natalie up, wrap her in his jacket, and make tracks toward the street where Lily said she would be waiting. Carrying Natalie’s dead weight wasn’t easy, especially with the cold cutting into Damien’s exposed arms and neck. But a few words of Power helped to warm his body enough that he didn’t have to worry about the cold, and the adrenaline running through his system afforded him three times his own strength; enough to carry Natalie’s unconscious body to the place he had to get to.

  When he got there the street was empty. The fog remained, floating silently like a procession, swallowing everything in its path. Occasionally Damien would hear a car whooshing past. His heart would leap, hoping that the car would stop and Lily would come out. But she hadn’t arrived yet, and Damien’s arms were starting to get weak.

  He glanced at Natalie’s body, flaccid in his arms, her head hanging listlessly, and wished for her to wake up and snap out of it when suddenly it looked, for a moment, like her face pinched into a grimace. His heart started to race in his chest. Damien could feel his own pulse banging against his temples but he couldn’t reach for her face to touch it or he would drop her.

  “Natalie?” he said, “Can you hear me?”

  She was moaning now, her muscles twitching involuntarily. Was she dreaming?

  “Natalie please,” he said, “Please wake up.”

  But she didn’t, and before he could ask again a car screeched to a halt only a few feet from the mouth of the alley Damien had been hiding in. Lily emerged from the driver’s side, scrambled around the car, and opened the back seat door. She had probably broken a few laws to get here as fast as she had, but he was glad for it.

  “How is she?” she asked, holding the door open.

  “I don’t know,” he said, gently easing Natalie’s body into the back. “Unconscious, far as I can tell, but I don’t know.”

  Arching over her now, after he had folded Lily’s jacket and placed Natalie’s head on it, he brushed her hair out of her face and tapped her lightly on the cheek. But Natalie’s skin was pale and cold to the touch, and she would not twitch like she had done before. She had a pulse—a weak one—but a pulse nonetheless.

  “Jesus, Damien, what the fuck happened?” Lily asked.

  Damien stepped out of the car, closed the backdoor, and went for the passenger seat. “Some guy came at us,” he said once Lily was inside.

  Without skipping a beat, she peeled out and started along the quiet San Francisco streets. “Some guy? Did you see who it was?”

  “I don’t know who it was. He was wearing a hood or a mask or something.”

  “You didn’t check?”

  Damien ran his hands through his hair and sighed. He was constantly checking over his shoulder to make sure Natalie wouldn’t fall off the seat. “The fog was thick,” he said, “I saw his silhouette the first time. Then in the alley, it all happened so damn fast. He threw some magick at Natalie but I think… I think the magick was meant for me.”

  “For you?”

  “Natalie pushed me out of the way. It happened while I was on the phone with you. I had my back turned and didn’t see him coming. I’m a fucking idiot.”

  “No,” she snapped, “None of this is your fault, do you understand?”

  Damien nodded, though he only did it to reassure his sister. He wasn’t about to stop blaming himself for what just happened to Natalie. It happened on his watch, while she was with him, so it was his fault. He was the more experienced Witch, after all. And yet, if it hadn’t been for what she did, he would be the one passed out right now under whatever hex that guy had lain.

  Would she ever wake up? He dared not think like that. Not right now. But the thought came at him anyway like a bill in the mail you wished you could ignore but simply couldn’t. He looked at her again and for a moment she had an almost calm serenity about her; like she was just in a deep sleep and could wake up at any moment. But the thought turned to ash in his mouth when he realized that she wouldn’t just wake up.

  He didn’t know how the certainty had come; only that it was there.

  When they arrived at the bottom of Lily’s apartment building she helped him carry the Witch up the stairs and into Lily’s bedroom where she proceeded to check the bumps and bruises on her skin. As a trained first aider she would be able to determine whether there was anything seriously wrong with her.

  Damien, meanwhile, took the spiritual approach and went about the room lighting the various candles Lily had on display. She loved candles. On the dresser he found a stick of incense and several lilac and jade candles, so he lit those. Then he went around and lit a bunch of fresh tea-lights, scattering them on whatever surface he could find. Finally he plucked a white candle from a drawer Lily had pointed out to him, placed it on the bedside table closest to Lily, and lit that too.

  Green, white, and purple; those were the colors of healing, protection, and the banishment of negativity.

  “So, where are the others?” Damien asked. It seemed like a random question to ask at the time, but it came anyway.

  “When I was stuck working late I called the meeting off. I figured you’d eventually come round, realize that Natalie’s great, and want to hang out with her on your own so I rescheduled with the others for next week.”

  If only Lily hadn’t done that things may have turned out differently, he thought. But he couldn’t blame his sister for wanting to set him up. “How is she,” he finally asked.

  “Alive,” Lily said, “And stable. She’s breathing ok, her heart seems fine. Besides a couple of bumps and bruises she should be fine… and awake.”

  “But she isn’t.”

  “No.”

  Silence hung. Outside he could hear traffic whooshing past. He wondered where the fuck they had all been when the warlock came.

  “Do you think the hit she took knocked her out?” Damien asked.

  “Maybe,” Lily said, “How hard do you think she hit the wall?”

  Damien didn’t like thinking about it, didn’t enjoy picturing Natalie getting struck by a bolt of energy and hurled into a solid wall. He hadn’t seen it happen, but his imagination filled in the blanks. Crack. That was the sound her body had made when i
t hit the wall.

  “Hard,” he said, “I’d be surprised if nothing’s broken. Can you reach for her? If she’s just knocked out, I mean.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Lily said, considering.

  “Do it. Please.”

  Lily nodded and sat on the bed next to Natalie. Damien watched as she placed her hand on the side of Natalie’s face that wasn’t touching the pillow and closed her eyes. He had never seen Lily do this before, but he knew she could. Her Power was mostly psychic. Damien could command the elements—mostly the West—but Lily could perform telepathic and telekinetic feats with her mind that would leave most Witches with their jaws hanging wide.

  She was a telepath, a telekinetic, and an astral traveler; and if she concentrated hard enough, she could even peel away the layers of this world to glimpse the shady world of the dead. But hers was all quiet work. There was no flash to her magick, no whipping winds or rumbling thunder; only the still, steady breathing and the occasional whispered words.

  Lily inhaled deeply, held her breath, and then exhaled. Damien watched, his body taut with anticipation, his heart pumping hard in his hands folded at his chest. She did it again, and then a third time. At the fourth, she didn’t exhale, and didn’t exhale, and didn’t exhale.

  Despite the sensitivity of the situation, he couldn’t help but admire how beautiful his sister looked. She had been the cavalry tonight; a knight with hair that fell about her shoulders in curly brown waves, tattoos on her shoulders, and sculpted elfin features. She and Damien could have been twins, only he didn’t like letting his hair grow too long.

  Twins, he thought, and smiled.

  She exhaled and shook her head, then whipped around to look at her brother. “I can’t reach her,” she said, her face grave.

  “Wh-what does that mean?”

  “It means she’s gone, Damien. I don’t know where she is.”

  “Gone? Gone from her body?”

  “I don’t know. I think she might still be in there, but it’s like something’s stopping her from coming back up.”

  “Something,” Damien said, “It wasn’t something that hit her, Lily, it was a man with beam of light.”

  “There must have been something inside the light,” Lily said.

  She stood upright, moved away from the bed and into the kitchen, and helped herself to a glass of water. Damien was parched and his voice was going hoarse, but he didn’t want to have a drink right now. He wanted Natalie to wake up, that was all; for her to wake up from this awful nightmare night.

  “Something inside the light?” Damien asked, “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “It must have been a hex. A powerful one.”

  A hex meant for me. “Why would someone just do that?”

  “That’s what we’re going to have to find out.”

  “How? We have no idea who this guy is or where he’s gone. It could have been Brian or Henry, but he could be anywhere and I’m no diviner.”

  “Divining won’t help anyway. If this guy is even half good he will have protection spells around him to stop us from just looking for him.”

  “So then what can we do?”

  Lily paused, wrinkled her face in thought, and then downed what remained of her glass of water. “We aren’t going to take her to the hospital,” she said, “A doctor isn’t going to help her. In fact, he’ll only ask questions we can’t answer.”

  Damien nodded, but he still didn’t understand how they were going to figure out what the Witch had done to Natalie. “Are we just going to wait, then?” he asked.

  “Waiting isn’t an option. We have to go inside.”

  “Inside?”

  “If there’s something stopping Natalie from waking up, we have to go inside her mind and find it.”

  He swallowed hard. “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s the only way. Even if I could reach for it from outside, I wouldn’t want to risk pulling it out of her. For all we know the process could hurt her, or even kill her. We have to go inside, Damien. It’s the only way.”

  Damien thought about it for a moment, hesitating. He remembered the cinnamon and honey scent she had given off at the bistro and now remembered how it had been missing when he carried her unconscious body through the alley.

  Lily was right. There was no other way.

  Chapter Four

  “Have you ever done this before?”

  Damien was standing over the bed where Natalie slept, watching Lily as she produced a bag of glinting, gleaming stones from a tiny purple pouch. She had sounded confident enough when she suggested they somehow enter Natalie’s mind and find whatever was keeping her under. But he had heard the stones click and clack together a little too erratically as she handled them and, for an instant, started to have doubts.

  Lily shook her head. “Never,” she said.

  “Never?”

  “I’ve gone into the Astral before, but never into someone else’s mind.”

  “So you don’t really know what’s going to happen in there, do you?”

  “I don’t. It’s going to be weird and uncomfortable, probably even dangerous, but what choice do we have?”

  None. That’s what choice they had. “What is it that’s going to happen to us exactly?”

  Lily went about the process of carefully placing a few of the lighter shaded rocks around Natalie’s head. The stones had magical properties, Damien knew, although he didn’t know them as well as he would have wanted. Amethyst, he recognized, and also Onyx. But there were others he didn’t recognize, including a fiery red stone that caught his eye. A Ruby? It seemed too orange to be a Ruby.

  “First,” Lily said, “We’re going to meditate. Then I’m going to pull your consciousness out of your body and gently weave it into Natalie’s. When you’re there, I’m going to project myself into the Astral and you’re going to call me with this stone.”

  She handed him the red stone. It was warm to the touch and the colors seemed to shift like fire. It felt like the warm embrace of a hearth on a cold night. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Natural Baltic Amber,” she said, “You’re going to take it with you.”

  “Take it with me?”

  “Ever had a dream where you squeezed something in your hand so tight that when you woke up you could swear it was still there? This is like that, but in reverse.”

  The idea made Damien’s head spin, but the stone… it seemed to sing to him from someplace far away. Like a voice thrown across a lake. Whose voice he couldn’t tell, but something inside of him sang back. He would never forget the warm wave that rushed through him as he handled the stone in his hand.

  “Alright,” he said, “I’m ready.”

  Lily nodded and stood up, gesturing for Damien to sit where she had been a moment ago. Some of the rocks shifted with the sudden slump Damien’s weight brought on the bed, but Lily put them back into place. Each, after all, had a purpose—and each had to be exactly where it was needed when Lily was ready to call on it.

  “Give me your hands,” she said, and Damien did. “I need you to concentrate. Clear your mind of everything that’s happened tonight; remove all doubt, all worry, all fear. Your thoughts have to be completely gone. Listen only to my voice and do as I’m about to tell you. Understand?”

  Damien nodded.

  “Hold the Amber tight in your hand,” Lily said, “And think of the beach. Listen to the water washing the sand, smell the salt in the air, feel the warm summer breeze.”

  Water was the Element of the West – his element. His Guardian wore the shape of a thousand cascading waterfalls and spoke with all the fury of a sea storm. He felt most at home near the ocean, so he imagined the water and let the wash, the salt, and the breeze fill his senses.

  When he closed his eyes he saw the San Francisco bay. He thought of the rocks where he had been waiting for Natalie earlier on and remembered the scent of the sea; the salt, the brine, the algae on the rocks. As the moment passed
, he started to hear sounds now too; gulls flying overhead, the clinking of bells, the lapping of water on wood. He wasn’t thinking these sounds now, he knew. They were just… there. Maybe Lily was responsible for them, but he couldn’t even hear Lily’s voice anymore. His mind was starting to drift, to float like cinders caught in an updraft.

  The only thing real to him, and solid, was the Amber in his hand.

  Damien.

  The voice was soft and distant, like the echo of a whisper, but it jerked him awake all the same. Had it been Natalie or Lily who said it? It had been a woman, to be sure, but which he couldn’t say. Nor did he know where he was. He couldn’t remember lying down on the bed but he was lying down now, only the bed was empty.

  Damien propped himself up with his elbows and rubbed his eyes as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep. He could still hear the gulls and the bells and the lapping, but as his eyes adjusted he was aware of a shift in the light. No longer was he in a candlelit bedroom with purple walls. He was on a boat now, in a cabin. The morning sun spilled into the room so bright it almost blinded him.

  Covering his eyes, Damien rose to his feet and held on to a nearby cabinet for support. The boat was rocking, he could tell, and when he went to the window he could see the Golden Gate Bridge to one side—standing majestically high above the water; impossibly high, almost—and Alcatraz on the other.

  He suddenly remembered the stone he had been clutching, and when he remembered it, he found it in the palm of his hand, catching the sun’s rays and throwing them about the room in beautiful amber shafts. It really does look like fire, he thought, fire captured in resin.

  “Damien.”

  The voice came again, only this time it had substance; felt real. That’s when he spun around and saw her, Lily, standing in the room with him. She must have come in from the deck because she hadn’t been inside the room when he woke up. Or maybe she had been there all along and he just hadn’t noticed. She was smiling, then, and looked as beautiful as ever.