And before my face, beloved of gods and of men,
let thine innermost divine self be enfolded,
in the rapture of the infinite.
—The Charge of the Goddess
Cort was in no way exaggerating when he’d told me there was a lot to cover—in fact, I was beginning to suspect that understatement was part of his sense of humor.
“Do I really need to know this?” I asked, and stared aghast at the three-page list of titles he’d compiled for me.
“Okay, I understand the books on symbols, the Brit history books, and even these compilations of legends, but do I really have to read this?” I pointed to the listing.
My uncle peered over my shoulder where I sat in the library, then chuckled. “What?” he asked lightly, “not a horoscope fan?”
I glanced up at him and met the light that danced in his eyes. “You’re kidding about the astrology, right?”
He laughed in answer. “Leave it for last if you’d like, but it’s not what you think. Come on, grab the first thing”— he pointed to the exact shelf—“and let’s get started.”
We went through history: Paleolithic cave drawings and the Venus of Willendorf, the Romanization of the tribes that had inhabited this part of Europe, and the martial history hidden in mythology—most especially the mythos that surrounded the dux bellorum, the War Duke, the leader of troops.
“Don’t take that part too seriously,” Cort said offhandedly when we moved from history to period literature.
“Which part?” I asked with a grin, “The fairies, the witches, or the quest for the—”
“Any of it,” he interrupted. “You just need to know how it relates to the history, forms the mindset that has since become part of the green ray. All of that other…” His forehead creased as he measured his words. “What’s real is so hidden under metaphor, I’d rather you ignored it for now—it’ll confuse things otherwise.”
I chewed on my lip as I thought about that. There were things he’d teach me outright, but others, he liked for me to reach my own conclusions, and I suspected this might be one of them.
But I did learn, and what I came to understand was exactly what Graham had meant by the difference between a generator and an electrical outlet.
That, and there were fascinating things on the Material, including the first level of Aethyr, the nonphysical dimension of our very physical world. The interactions were intricate, and astrology, the science I had much maligned, played a real role. Not in the “you’ll find some money today” or “beware of a black dog rounding your corner” sort of way, but in a measurable physical one.
As I struggled to understand the effects of one form of energy on another, I surfaced from the charts I was immersed in, just so I could watch Fran across the room, her head bent over the texts she studied. Every now and again, she’d toss her head and her hair would shift, then settle on her shoulder. She wore an expression of such intense concentration. I found myself staring at the way her brow would furrow or her lips purse as she pounced on the right answer and wrote it down.
“What?” she asked, her lips quirked with the smile she couldn’t quite repress as she raised an eyebrow at me.
I put down my book and swallowed. There was a very good reason we sat so far away from each other—we weren’t forbidden to touch, it was simply that once we did, there seemed to be almost no boundary, no marking point between loving touch and making love; the last few nights we’d held each other so tightly, bodies rigid with the effort to not cross that line, to relax, soften, entwine…
“What?” she asked again, and this time, she did smile.
“The moon,” I said finally when I found my voice and the subject I was supposed to be focused on. “How can an orbiting lump of rock be so important to anything?”
“Sam. It pulls the oceans from one side of the planet to the other. How can it not be important, not affect you?” She shook her head and returned her attention to the equations spread before her. “Two days,” she said softly.
“What?” I knew it was an echo of her earlier question, but Fran didn’t mind.
“Today, and tomorrow, and then…” She let that hang there as her glance told me everything she thought, she wanted. We wanted the same things.
“And then?”
“If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t find out.”
I was warm, I was restless; I couldn’t take it anymore. I closed the book, shoved away the charts, and got out of my chair. “Look like what?” I asked when I stood next to her. Even six inches away, it was almost too much to bear, the shimmer of energy that radiated from her that reached toward me, not in a hungry, seeking sense, but as part of its natural flow, part of our connection.
I rested my hand on the table next to her notes. “Look like what?” I repeated softly as I leaned over to catch the scent of her hair.
She placed her hand over mine. “Stop, please.” She looked up at me. “I can barely breathe, never mind read, with you this close. You know this is hard on me too.”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t help myself anymore; I so wanted to kiss her, a simple, little kiss on the cheek. “Is it very hard?” I hadn’t meant to speak in double entendres, but once it was said, it was the question she answered.
“Very,” she whispered across my lips. “It’s very, very hard.” And then her mouth was next to mine as I kneeled next to her chair, her hand held tight in mine and our fingers almost crushing as we told each other as directly as we could how we felt.
“Would the two of you prefer lunch here or in the dining room?” Elizabeth’s voice broke through to my consciousness and it was with great regret that I ended our kiss.
Fran’s nostrils flared, her hair was slightly mussed, and the glimpse of golden primal wild that flashed in her eyes as they held mine told me I probably looked no different. The sweet of her tongue lingered on my lower lip as I tasted it.
“Whatever’s easiest,” I answered, unable to tear my eyes away from Fran’s. I could barely hear myself through the rhythm that beat in my head, and completely lost whatever it was Fran said as I stood with her hand still in mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her and finally, to Elizabeth. “I wasn’t, I mean, we weren’t—”
“I know, I wasn’t worried about that,” she smiled and answered. “I’ve an idea, though. Lunch up here since you’re both studying, but Ann, would you mind spending a moment with me? I’d like for us to talk.”
“Sure,” I agreed and Fran gave my fingers a quick squeeze before she let me go. “I’ll go down with you, then.”
“Thank you.”
I bent to give Fran the original kiss I’d planned. “Hurry up,” she said and grinned. “It’s hard and I’m hungry.”
That made me laugh, and I kept the smile until I walked into the kitchen to help Elizabeth with the food and the trays. Everything was already laid out, soup, sandwich fillers, it merely had to be arranged and served.
I knew what she wanted to discuss and I preempted her as we worked together on the counter. “Elizabeth…Fran and I, it’s what we have to do. Surely you understand that.”
“I do,” she agreed. “I understand why you would think and feel that way, as well as why she does. But, Ann, she’s not weak, she’s not less than you. If anything, she’s your match in so many ways.”
“But the threats, and that hound, the one that almost—”
This time Elizabeth interrupted me. “It wasn’t because she was unable to defend herself. You, you’re under her barrier, all the time, within it, as much as she’s within yours. What that…” And her lips tightened even as I could feel the wave of anger and disgust that came from her. “What that thing attempted to do was to breach it, to force the rapport, mental rape, if that explains it for you, gives you a better idea, and that can happen to anyone, for any reason.” Her voice gentled as she continued. “It’s what happened to you, when you were so very small.”
I felt the blood drain out of my face as I tried not to spill tomato soup anywhere but into the bowls, and a flare of quickly muted fury that anyone would try to do such a thing, to anyone, and especially to Fran. “I didn’t know that.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Elizabeth agreed. She paused as she sliced perfect forty-five degree angles into the bread before her. “I’m afraid that…” She sighed, then began again. “You’re hurting yourself, hurting each other unnecessarily. I think you’re making a tremendous mistake based on gaps in your knowledge, and until they’re filled and corrected, you’ll make others.”
“I expect that I will make some mistakes,” I said, “as this is not something I was born knowing. But,” I added quietly, “Cort thinks I’m doing the right thing.”
For the first time since I’d known her, I felt as much as heard something as close to a snap as I’d ever seen from Elizabeth.
“Of course he does—he trains Wielders, the Light Bearers, and nothing comes before that.”
Wielders. Plural. My father counted as one and I as another. But the way she’d said it… Was there another he’d trained besides the ones I knew about? “Wielders…as in more than two?” I asked.
Elizabeth didn’t answer that as she took a tray and I another to follow her back out of the kitchen. “Just remember,” she said, stopping to face me as we stood before the landing. Her very being almost vibrated with her intent as she searched my face. “There is more to you than the sword and the Light. You…your very self, are a living soul, and you too are meant to find the happiness you can, as much as any other.”
*
It turned out that we were all encouraged to eat as much as we wanted since the next day would be a fast day until after the Rite.
“We have to do this starving on every level,” Fran joked and I agreed. But we were well behaved, as well behaved as we’d been for the prior six long nights even as we lay skin to skin in a careful embrace that satisfied only the most surface need to touch and nothing else.
“You don’t have to go through this with me, you know,” Fran had said one night when the connect and the skin and the kiss had left us both with a longing that was a physical ache.
“You could let me just…” And she skimmed her hand along my side, over my hip, and I caught it in mine.
“No,” I countered as I linked my fingers through hers, “if you have to, I have to.” That just didn’t seem fair, and besides, once she touched me, I had to touch her, not for any other reason than I needed to, I wanted to, I simply had to. The compulsion was as irresistible as it was undeniable.
“I love you,” she sighed as she kissed me and we pulled each other closer, let our legs tangle together.
“And I love you.” I kissed her nose and we lay together, simply staring into one another’s eyes, reading the world in them, the world that was us, letting the energy and intensity grow and build.
“Turn around, let me hold you,” she asked quietly. “We’re never going to sleep like this.”
“If I do that,” I whispered back, “you have roving hands and we still won’t sleep.”
“Guilty as charged,” she allowed with a tiny smirk, “but we’ll feel better.”
I smiled back at her. “Close your eyes. We’ll sleep fine, I think.” I did as I suggested.
“Are you asleep?” I asked less than a minute later.
I knew the answer, though, even before I opened my eyes to find hers still on me, and I chuckled.
“You giggle?” she teased. “Can you do that again?”
“Don’t tickle me,” I warned, “things might happen.” Her fingertips played up and down my arms anyway.
“Oh yeah? What sort of things?” God, the way she spoke was so sensual even as she teased me.
“This!” I surged against her, pressed her beneath me, and she welcomed my tongue between her lips.
“So…” I said almost breathlessly as I stared down at her. I held her hands over her head in mine. “No tickling.”
“You’re evil.”
I thought about that for a moment as I released one of her hands and her legs slid against mine. “I might be,” I agreed and circled her nipple with my thumb. It was so beautifully hard and Fran sighed under me.
“Okay, you’ve made your…point,” she said, glancing down at my hand and I stopped, only to kiss her again, but this really had to stop before we couldn’t, and we fit around each other, her back curved against my belly, my hand firmly on hers.
“You owe me,” she said into the almost-sleep silence.
“Hmm?”
“When all of this is done, I’m gonna tickle you.”
“Ha. I’ll remember that,” I promised as I tightened my arm around her waist and tucked my head behind hers.
“No, you won’t,” she teased, “and then? I’ll get you, you’ll see.”
“Uh-huh, sure, if that’s the first thing you want to do when you can,” I teased back.
She turned in my arms and I could see the slow, sexy smile she gave me in the near dark. “That’s not the only thing I want to do.”
“Really?” I asked, the words soft and muted as I spoke them so close to her lips. “What else do you have in mind?”
I kissed her and the ardent return of her lips gave me the answer even as she eased her leg between mine and she slipped a hand down to my hip to clutch me to her.
I knew what she wanted to do, and I wanted her to do it. The quiet, sensual little moan that escaped when I felt her breasts against mine—wehavetostop, wehavetostop, wehavetostop—“What makes you think,” I gasped out raggedly against the pounding in my head and chest, the feel of her heart wild against mine, the muscles of her back under my fingertips and the desperate way hers dug into my hip, “that I’m gonna let you?”
She gave a small chuckle, and I knew she recognized my tactic for the diversion it was. “Because,” she said and kissed the sensitive skin just under my ear, “you like the way I do it.”
Of course I did—and we both knew it. “I don’t,” I said anyway, just to play.
“Really? You don’t?” she drawled, knowing I was playing as I drew my fingers up her back, along her shoulders, then up her neck until I could catch her face in my hands.
“You know I don’t like it,” I said softly as I gazed into eyes that gleamed at me in the intermittent light from the window and drew my thumb against her cheek. “I love it,” I told her and kissed her gently, “I love you, love what you do.”
The urgent need hadn’t abated, but the frantic pull eased back to a manageable sensuality. “Love you too,” she murmured against my lips, “love what you do.”
Entwined as closely as if we’d just made love (and maybe we had in a way), we once more settled in. “Shh now. Sleep,” I whispered.
“You’re still gonna owe me,” she whispered back, then kissed my neck.
I did, and knew I always would. She gave me everything and I owed her everything—and the only way I had right now of paying her back was to do everything I could to keep her safe.
*
That rode through my mind as we separately took the long drive, me with Cort, Fran with Elizabeth, to wherever it was that this whole thing was supposed to take place. With almost every suburb ending in “ham” or “shire,” they tended to blur in my mind, in much the same way that the three different versions of Compton had when we first got to London, and I was not as surprised as I’d thought I’d be to discover that most of the ceremony would happen outdoors.
“Won’t everyone get cold?” I asked Cort.
He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Between the ritual, the fires, and the energy, no one will notice. You’ll see.”
As we walked along a side path that led to the yard, the carefully tended shrubs gave way to vines, all obviously painstakingly trained to grow along a canopy so that at the far end, a scene from ages past was set in a yard that seemed to roll on until it met yet another field bounded by a stonework fence, that yawed from there to a mountain.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but this… People, perhaps sixty or more, some in regular dress while others were in robes, all rushed about in an organized chaos, moving tables, setting torches along a set path, groups clustered to light not one, not two, but four well-contained fires that were about six feet or so in diameter and were maintained to a height of about two feet.
“They’re getting ready to meet the first star of the evening,” Cort said into my ear as I gaped about.
Someone pressed a mug into my hand, glazed warm clay that was smooth under my fingers. “It’s okay, you know—it’s part of the whole Rite,” he told me after he sipped from his own mug.
I took a tentative sip. It was sweet, almost overwhelmingly so, and the taste made me think of pears.
The sense of excitement and expectation grew, was a palpable haze in the neoprimitive scene that blossomed before my eyes.
“C’mon,” Graham said, appearing at my shoulder out of seemingly nowhere, “we have to wait here.” His eyes danced with reflected flame, with his own energy. His outline hazed, shifted and glowed, and I glanced over to Cort, who nodded.
“Go on,” he said and grinned at me, “go join the other young bucks.”
I glanced at Graham, who smiled widely. “It’s a traditional…test,” he said. “C’mon!” and he pulled on my elbow.
“Good luck!” Cort called and waved at me.
Bemused, I walked with Graham, careful not to spill my drink as we crossed the yard, and he took me downfield where a knot of people gathered. “Here,” he said, “we wait here. Have another sip,” he said kindly. “You’ll see.”
I hesitated a moment as I looked about me, the energy thick as it swirled around us with the heavy, edgy bite of expectation. “You feel it already,” Graham said quietly into my ear, “because you walk between worlds. This,” and he hefted the drink he carried in his own hand, “is to help open the gates, and you,” he examined me closely, “well, you’re already walking through them, aren’t you.”
Following his example, I lifted the mug to drink. The sweet taste of herbs and pears flowed past my lips, my tongue, was a soothing, syrupy river down my throat. A gong sounded deep and clear, ringing in a tone that seemed to echo across the Worlds.
Voices called from different corners, the Convocation, the formation of the Circle, the welcome of the Elements and their respective directions. The air shimmered as they were called and came, and the Circle grew almost visible, a gauzy light curtain I could see so long as I didn’t look at it directly.
From behind us came the answering call that rang with its own crystalline purity as the note hung, swelled. It filled the Circle as they came, the procession.
A woman led them, her carriage strong, proud, and graceful, her hair a glow of white as they entered the cleared center. They were six in all, dressed in white that flowed with the currents of air and fire, flowed with the grace of water, meeting the earth only to flow back up, the cycle over and over and over.
Elizabeth, it was Elizabeth, I realized even as I sipped again, and when she stopped, a new, smaller, Circle formed: one stood within and she without.
It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t hear the words spoken from the inside, nor the responses the crowd made, so much as I couldn’t translate them, but it didn’t matter; I understood them in a deep way. This was familiar, this was something I’d done a thousand times. This was the way home.
“What’s the test?” I asked Graham quietly as the excitement I’d felt before grew in the hearts that surrounded me and in my own, an impatient wilding surge of energy that powered my limbs, sharpened my senses, made my chest beat with the same pounding rhythm that echoed through the Circle.
Graham’s fingers tapped with nervous energy on my hand and when I glanced at him, his smile seemed to grow. I knew him, recognized his soul clearly, and put my arm around his shoulders in welcome. I kissed his cheek. He was my brother, my friend, my kith and kin, and his fingers drummed on mine in return.
“Who will be the Champion for the Goddess,” he whispered and held me closer. “Consort, defender, willing sacrifice—all of it. As above, so below.”
The shuffle and the mutter grew around us, an agitated jostle of bodies, the restive twitch and flex of muscle. We were waiting, waiting…oxen caged and penned, dogs given scent straining against the leash, a pack, an army about to charge, the arrow nocked against the bow, waiting on the word, waiting for—
“No worries, my brother,” Graham said into my ear and I couldn’t help but notice his lips were soft along its edge, “you’ll win, I know it.”
Brother. Yes, we were, had always been…
My blood sang, sang a fiery high praise through me as it rose with the stars, with the voices that called all around us, my body flowed with the rhythm of the tide, filled with the strength of the earth that pounded with the drums beneath my feet, the scent of smoke and herbs and cut grasses the counterpoint that swirled around my head and…
She was out there, in the center of that smaller Circle, shining like ice, like fire, like crystal, the nimbus around Her the borealis, a flame into the sky.
The question blew out into the Circle, the clear call of challenge that I moved forward to answer, forging my way through the bodies that blocked me, the impeding arms and legs, Graham encouraging and solid at my back. No one else had the right, not the way I did, and I knew it as I pushed and wrestled through, using my shoulders to advance, to open my path. I could feel them around me, the ones who struggled through as well, saw them with my peripheral vision as the very physical challenge continued, the gauntlet we struggled through. There were five, then four, then two. This was my place and I knew it, knew that I was the one to do it—no one else had the right, or the claim, I had. Then my forward progress was arrested as someone solidly stopped me.
Completely halted, I looked at the large bare chest before me, the arms that bulged with muscle and strength ending in firm large fists that curled on hips perched over solidly planted legs. He. Was. Huge.
His head was shaved and the firelight glistened on the light sheen of sweat that covered his face, his shoulders, highlighting the muscles in his chest. “Let the Champion be tested,” called the Guardian of the Goddess. “By what right would you defend?” His lip curled at me with scorn.
His eyes caught the bonfire, blazing with contempt as everyone seemed to fall back and away, Graham too, after a reassuring press on my shoulder. They left us to stand alone, the Guardian between me and my goal. I could feel Her eyes on me from behind him as I squared my shoulders, felt the line of force flow through my spine as it straightened.
The energies became intersecting lines, the Elementals jumped and jigged about me as my bones, my blood, my soul remembered the answer, then spoke it for me.
“I claim by right of blood,” I said as he swung at me, his feet planted in the earth as I floated away like air. “I claim in the face of death.” He burned, moved with living flame, and I flowed around him like water. “I claim it for life.” The leg came up for the aerial move and I hit the ground, let it sweep, a sharp gust over me and I saw it as I straightened, the opening in the nexus of force and I reached out to tap his chest with my finger as my own fire burned within. “I claim it with love.” He overbalanced and fell hard, and the earth gnomes danced around him as the salamanders of fire lit my way.
She was the Goddess before me and I fell as the rain to my knees. “I claim it for you,” I whispered. Undines sang and the sylphs brushed my hair away from my face as She took my hand in Hers. She raised me to stand before Her as the world shifted and shook, the Light that surrounded Her almost blinding as the voices sang in my ears, “Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!” loud enough to match the heart I suddenly felt beat within me, the painful lurch of life.
“And I lay claim to you,” the Goddess said, and She crowned me as Consort with Her kiss.
“The Challenge has been answered,” the voice of the man I’d just seen fall to earth cried. “The Goddess will be served!”
“Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!”
Elizabeth stood before us when the kiss ended and I saw her as she held the chalice before me. I took it from her hands and pulled deeply, the words she spoke a buzz in my ears as the syrupy mix raced under my skin, her meaning clear as the inner Circle closed around us. Quick, careful hands stripped me, then covered us both with a soft blanket.
It was impossible to tell if we were guided or carried to the pavilion-tent-grove-room— whatever it was—because Her skin played against me, wrapped under that smooth cloth and around each other as we moved. Fingers fed me as hands stroked my hips, my ribs, the catch of my body on Hers. I don’t know what I ate, only that there was the taste of grapes and the soft lips perfect on mine. Somehow we lay together, and everything everywhere was the touch of silk, of satin, soft and cushioned against my back with my nerves alive and tingling.
“Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!”
The chorus sang over and over, the call and cry of strength, of triumph, to the beat of blood and drums, a pulse of life and love and lust that the rhythmic pound focused in me, and even as I hardened and swelled, my vision splintered further, now the world, now the energies that intersected it, and She towered above me, “Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!” the Great Huntress and Healer, the Mother and Reaver, the essential primitive perfect warrior, the consummate nurturer. Golden fingertips placed a ruby of fire between my lips that I sucked and swallowed.
The elements and energies swirled and coiled, focused, filling the air, thick enough to swim through. “Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!” She smiled down at me even as She rose again to part Herself, Her body, to receive mine.
I was Her Champion, by right, by contest, by choice—I was Her chosen Consort. “Isis, Astarte, Diana—Hecate, Demeter, Kali—Inanna!” I gasped at the connect through it all, the snap of the intense physical that married us on every level as She claimed Her prize.
*
“I so rarely get to see you like this,” Fran’s voice tickled against my ear as her fingertip traced a light path along my face.
“Hmm? Like what?” I asked as I stretched, enjoying the strength I could feel in my own body, the warmth of the sun that shone in through the window on us, and the completing and satisfying pressure of Fran next to me.
We had two days, two whole days to do nothing but enjoy one another before we were back to our routines, the lectures and studies, the research, and of course, rehearsals for me, but for now…we had one another and the time to relax. I supposed everyone needed to recover from the Rite.
“Like this,” she said and slid over me. She caught my hands in hers then spread her palms against mine, and I looked up into eyes that still hadn’t lost the extra spark they’d carried since she was the Goddess before me. “Warm and relaxed.” She smiled, then kissed me softly. “Soft…open…peaceful.” She kissed me again between each word.
“Do you have anything in mind for today?” I asked quietly. “We haven’t gone to Ronnie Scott’s yet, and there’s…mph.” Her lips had found the sensitive spot of my throat and tugged gently.
“Nothing I can think of or want,” she said against my ear, “involves leaving this room.” Her entire body eased along mine and I returned the slide of her hands before I wrapped my arms around her.
“I love the way you think,” I told her as the warmth from the sun became the warmth from her skin and suffused me, made me liquid sunshine next to her.
“You just love me for my mind,” she murmured as I ran my hands down her back, gently kneading the muscles on the way until the beautiful curve of her backside was under my palms and I pulled her closer to me.
“I do,” I answered, then kissed her. “And I love your spirit.” I shifted my hips and held her closely so I could roll her beneath me. “I love your heart,” I told her and kissed her again. “I love your soul,” I murmured against her breast, her nipple hard between my teeth, the taste sweet under my tongue. “I love the body that holds them,” I said as I let my hands go where they wanted, “the way you look,” she parted her thighs for me, “the way you feel, taste…” And I gazed for a hot and hungry moment upon her cunt, the fine dark gold hairs, the proud jut of her clit that hardened for me and the sheen of her arousal as it pooled at her entrance, the entrance that had welcomed my tongue, my clit, my cock and my fingers.
I loved to look, but I couldn’t wait anymore. “This…” I whispered as I felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through her echo through me. “This is how I show you,” I said and I gratefully took her into my mouth, knowing I had the rest of this day and the next to show her just how much.
*
It was probably the shortest forty-eight hours I’d ever known, and when we did finally emerge from our cocoon to the world, it was to discover that everything and nothing had changed.
The rapport between us was so absolute that if she was hungry, I felt it; if I was sore from an evening session with my uncle, she would absentmindedly rub her own shoulder. When we wanted one another there was no way of knowing with whom the desire had originated.
And…I noticed that the flame that danced and beckoned in Fran’s eyes was the same added shine that both my guardian and my teacher bore; it was part of Graham too, if I took the time to think about it.
We hardly parted, choosing instead to maintain a physical connection in addition to the emotional and psychic, partially because being apart actually hurt, was a clearly discernable lack. And while we never spoke of it, we both knew our time was running down—so we were making the most of every moment.
What hadn’t changed was that I still couldn’t connect all the dots, and learning the myth that formed the background of the cult of Judas didn’t help.
“They say,” Cort began after a session that had further developed my ability to monitor and to affect small changes in metabolism, “that Judas had thought to escape his fate, his karma, his wyrd,” and he grinned at Elizabeth and Fran when he said it, knowing that was the preferred word in their tradition, “by hanging himself. But he did not. In fact, the legend says that while he seemed dead, the Lords of Light had sentenced him to walk the earth until he could save as many as his actions had betrayed. And in greedy zest for mortal life, he learned how to steal, to drink, to trade in the essences of life for youth of the body, of the mind.
“In time, a cult grew around this, believing that to steal another’s essence was to increase one’s own. They each wear a token—and since they’re all about power, the placement of the token varies with position in the hierarchy.”
Fran curled her fingers into mine on my lap and snuggled closer into my shoulder. “Well, what is it?”
Cort gave a grim little smile. “Since he hanged himself, the token is a piece of rope, usually hemp of some sort. Hounds who are not vessels—do you understand what vessels are?” he broke off to ask, his gaze resting on each of us in turn.
I took a wild guess. “Voluntary servants or something?”
The twist on his lips tightened further. “They voluntarily give their services, their minds, and their energies, to a dark Master and their hounds.”
Cort nodded into the silence that greeted that. I couldn’t think of anything more horrifying. To knowingly, willingly, give oneself up like that? But why? Why would anyone choose such a thing?
But there was something even more important to know for now. “So the hounds have tokens too?”
“They tend to wear them about their wrist or ankle. Vessels and those chosen to advance will wear one about the neck, and those fully fledged…well…” He stared into the fire. “They bear a mark,” he said softly. “They wear a rope around their bodies in ritual, and are marked by a brand, an incised brand, where they say the heart used to be. Those chosen to be devoured are marked similarly, with an iron cross.”
“Are they right?” Fran asked.
“In what way?”
“Can they actually extend their lives?”
“Legend says so.”
I shifted in my seat. Maybe there was something here after all. “How long?”
His eyes rested on mine with serious intent. “No one knows for certain—nor how they die either.”
I nodded as I absorbed that. “Ignoring the live-forever thing,” I said, “what does that do? Stealing essence, I mean?”
“It can extend their abilities through the Aethyr, and they can share some of their abilities with their hounds and vessels,” Elizabeth said.
I twisted my head to see her clearly. “What do you mean? What abilities?”
She answered quietly and her face bore such quiet anger I almost knew what she’d say before she spoke it. “The ability to track and follow, to reach through one to touch another, and the breach of the natural shield—the forced rapport.”
I didn’t know if it was Fran or I who shivered at that, and I held her tighter even as her hand closed with strength around mine.
“If the cult’s been revived, then how do we stop them?” That’s what my father had thought, and if his theories were as sound as his notes…
Cort stared into the flames and they reflected back into his eyes, making them burn from without as well as within when he faced me.
“There are two ways,” he said. “You can strip them of their abilities—bind and contain them on the Astral or,” he took a deep breath, “your sword, yours specifically.”
“So, if we find them and contain them, we can eliminate the threat?” I asked, puzzling it out aloud.
“No.” His answer was curt, abrupt. “If Judas still walks, they look for him. Every incarnation of the cult has sought to find and put him into temporal power.”
“But this is a legend,” I interrupted. It was confusing because he’d began as if he was sharing a story, but now, it seemed as if he considered it more than that.
“All legends have a root in truth,” Fran said quietly.
“Well then,” I asked, “what if we find and contain him?”
The tiger that I saw so often in Cort’s eyes came roaring to life as he gazed at me. “He cannot be contained—only destroyed.”
“Then the real question is,” I said as I thought it, “who is Judas?”
Cort shook his head. “No one knows—but then, no one is certain that it’s that much more than legend either.”
His jaw set as he stared once more into the flames and I felt the anticipation that waved from him, from Elizabeth, become something thick and heavy in the air as everything suddenly clicked, a definitive lock in my head as pieces fell together.
“What’s the relic?” I asked into pregnant silence broken only by the occasional pop in the grate. “What’s the heart of the blade?” I’d held it so often, had felt its vibrations and carried its extension through the Aethyr, the Astral, on the Plains, and now it had a connection to a legend that my Da had died to prove had been brought to life.
I didn’t know if I was afraid of the answer, didn’t know if it would make sense, might fit into the puzzle in a way that would give a hint of the larger picture, but if it was worth my father’s life to find out, then it was worth my discomfort to ask.
When my guardian and teacher faced me again, his eyes seemed haunted.
“A nail,” he said finally, “a very old nail.”
*
In the week before Samhain, Cort and I spent the first three days traveling. It would have been a few hours’ ride, he told me, but there were more people to see and speak with on the way—the Inner Circle was being called and told the location as close to the time as possible.
As he explained to me on our way in a car he’d rented for that very purpose, any member about to be inducted to the Inner Circle faced, as he’d put it, “certain mortal peril,” which meant no riding about on my Vespa, no wandering around town without him, and pretty much no anything outside the apartment that was not under his very watchful gaze.
Thankfully, our very first stop would be Lyddie and Graham’s, and as we rode along through the traffic-congested streets, Cort explained some of the details of the Rite to come. I’d be asked to maintain a three-day vigil, a trance that he would monitor throughout, to face for the first time, truly alone, whatever waited out there on the Plain and to confront it as best I could, armed only with what I knew. I would be given breaks, small ones for essential food and water.
I nodded grimly, wondering if I’d be able to endure it and determined to no matter what. My Da had done it, and so had his mother, my grandmother, the woman neither of us had ever known.
“You’ll need a second,” Cort said.
“What’s a second?”
“Someone to follow you on your journey, to be the living recorder of what happens. And since I’m certain you’ll be nervous,” he cut his eyes toward me and gave me a grin, “to make sure you’ve been properly prepared, haven’t forgotten to tie a shoelace or some such, once the Rite begins.”
He answered my question before I spoke it. “No, it can’t be Fran—she has her own part to play.”
I wondered about that as we stepped into the building.
“The time and place have been decided,” Cort said when Lyddie opened the door.
She took my hands in hers and bowed her head over them. “I welcome the youngest of the Inner Circle to my home,” she said.
The words had the force of ritual behind them and I didn’t know how to respond.
At that moment, Graham stepped up and Cort clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Well, ask him, then,” he said, and I could hear the humor in his tone. I glanced back up at him to see the briefest twinkle of amusement in his eyes.
I took a breath, not certain if I felt anything other than numb. “Graham…I need a second. Will you be mine?”
“To work with the Light Bearers,” he whispered reverently, eyes shining. “To be your second, your shield bearer? Yes, of course,” he answered and we shook hands to agree.
He pulled me into a strong hug which I returned. “I won’t let you down, brother,” he promised solemnly.
“I know you won’t.”
My second. With everything else that was about to happen, it was reassuring to have Graham with me.
Since Graham would stay with us for the next few days, we stayed long enough for him to pack the things he needed while Cort and Lyddie covered whatever details they had to, then he continued the journey with us as Cort took me through the rounds. They all greeted me in the same way Lyddie had.
“This isn’t everyone,” Cort said as we pulled back to the apartment. “There are a few—not all of them part of the Circle, but certainly part of the plan—you’ll meet the night of your sealing.”
I felt light-headed as we trooped up the stairs after we’d hung up our coats by the door, and even with the almost festive air during dinner after Graham had been shown his room, as well as the very real joy Fran and I shared later, I couldn’t help but lie awake even as I tried to force myself to sleep, not because I didn’t know what tomorrow would be, but because I did.
Everything I’d learned would be tested, would bring what had previously been practice, lecture, and exercise into a very visceral reality—a reality where my Da had been killed, not because he was a fireman in the line of duty, but because of this, the pursuit of a legend, a reality where innocents had been hurt, maimed, murdered, for sport, with greed—in fear for the protection of a secret I now knew only the most surface part of, a secret that put people I loved in danger.
The days that followed the Sealing would bring the search for the truth my father died for and the identity of whoever had killed the hound I’d hunted what seemed like ages ago on the Astral. Tomorrow would bring me closer still to the coming separation from Fran, from everything in so many ways. The future carried the sword I still wasn’t sure I could use or how, and the very real confidence that Cort and Elizabeth seemed to have that I could live up to whatever it really was that was expected of me. And the very real probability of a particularly violent death.
My Da had died to find a truth, my grandmother in a failed defense. I didn’t know how I could do or face any of that, and accomplish what they couldn’t. That…scared me.