Daniela

Lizbeth’s dream was the world’s dream. Even as she slipped in and out of this reality, Daniela was not unaware of the changes happening around her. She felt the power of magic as it reentered their world and took hold once more. Things had shifted; a drastic transformation had been wrought with this one act. Where the blood sisters had once been unknown to the world . . . now—for better or for worse—their legacy had been foisted on an unsuspecting humanity.

And then she was alone again. Lost in a sea of sensation and tranquillity. A place from which she did not want to return.

Until the voices came, and then she was forced to listen.

•   •   •

. . . like swimming in a vat of molasses, everything sticky sweet and sludgy . . . can’t open my eyes . . . can’t open my mouth . . . can’t breathe . . . like a heavy stone pressing on my chest . . . so dark, but not empty . . . lights playing . . . pink, purple, cerulean blue, Day-Glo green . . . like fireworks . . .

WAKE UP.

The voice broke through to her brain—the only thing that had reached her since her coma had begun—and Daniela surfaced. She couldn’t feel her body, but she knew she was back in reality, if only for the most fleeting of moments. There were voices, speaking a language she didn’t understand, or maybe her brain was garbling their words. She didn’t know.

. . . back under . . . floating on the sludge, my body part of it . . . I’m made of the sludge . . . I hear them singing . . . like mermaids singing each to each . . . like a line of poetry I can’t remember . . . the colors dancing . . . pink, purple, cerulean blue, Day-Glo green . . . like fireworks . . .

WAKE UP.

The voice was jarring, ripping her back into reality. She was cognizant again. She’d come up from the abyss before, but only for brief bits and pieces of disjointed time. Now it was different. The stone that had been holding her down in the dark place was gone and she felt a lightness in her chest.

But then a slicing pain cut through her body and she cried out in agony. She tried to swallow, the raw skin of her throat dry and cracked, and nausea hit her like a car accident, unexpected and violent. She began to retch, her body doing work she had no control over. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t turn her head to evacuate the bile that rose up into her mouth.

She began to cough, aspirating liquid and phlegm into her lungs. She heard an alarm go off, the sound piercing. It beat a rhythm of pain into her brain, each note a nail being hammered directly into her central cortex.

. . . floating again . . . the pain gone . . . lost to that old reality I am no longer in . . . floating, floating, floating . . .

WAKE UP. DO IT NOW.

The voice was insistent, jolting her awake . . . and then another voice, this one familiar to her, reached out from beyond.

“Daniela?”

A siren’s call from outer space. Totally improbable . . . but Lyse was here. Lyse had come for her. Her sister . . . no, Lyse wasn’t her sister . . . was more like her cousin . . . the terminology was unimportant. She was related to Lyse by blood and that’s all that mattered.

Lyse is here for me, Daniela thought. How is that possible?

She’d been so alone for so long . . . and now that loneliness was replaced by the joyful knowledge that she was joined to Lyse forever. They were family.

“I know you can hear me,” Lyse said, her voice scratchy. She sounded like she’d been crying.

Daniela wanted to open her eyes, wanted to see if the voice truly belonged to Lyse, but it was just too difficult to make her body do what she wanted. Near impossible, even.

“I explained about the gloves. They’ve put them on you. They didn’t understand, at first, didn’t realize they were making you worse . . .”

Lyse’s voice trailed off.

. . . no, I trailed off . . . back to floating in the sludge . . . I want to stay here . . . so warm and safe . . . only the floating . . .

WAKE UP, DANIELA.

The voice demanded action from her and so she followed it back to life:

“She’s coming around.”

Another voice she recognized, low and mellifluous . . . it could only be Arrabelle. She really wanted to open her eyes and see if she was right, but her eyelids only seemed willing to flutter.

“I think she’s trying to open her eyes.”

This voice she didn’t know. It was softer than the others, younger and broken-sounding. It was as if upon hearing it for the first time, a well of sadness opened up underneath Daniela and she fell headlong into it. Fell far and fell fast.

. . . I am falling . . . but not the same . . . black . . . black . . . blackness . . . no lights . . . no warmth . . . tentacles slithering around me . . . searching me out . . . wanting to pull me down further . . . wanting to wrap around me and squeeze me into oblivion . . . not death . . . but a death of some sort . . . an end I won’t be able to escape from if I stay . . .

WAKE UP. THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME. WE PROMISE.

She believed the voice and she fought to return to the old reality, aggressively wanting to come back now. She didn’t want to go down to the sludgy place ever again. Something had changed and it wasn’t the same as when she’d left it. Not safe and warm, not womblike.

“. . . she’s here. I feel her for the first time. She’s coming back.”

Open your eyes, Daniela thought. Open, dammit!

It was working. Her eyelids were fluttering . . . but disappointment flooded her brain when she realized they still wouldn’t budge.

“Daniela?”

Lyse was close to her. She could smell the other woman’s scent like a talisman, drawing her out of the abyss. Back to true consciousness.

“I can’t touch you—even though I want to,” she heard Lyse say, a catch in her voice. “But I’m here and I need you back. Do you understand? I won’t lose you, too.”

Daniela felt something hot and wet fall onto her cheek. A tear. Lyse’s tear.

“. . . yse . . .” she moaned, her lips barely moving. “. . . yse . . .”

“I’m here,” she felt Lyse murmur close to her ear. “I’m not going anywhere.”

This time when the fingers of unconsciousness grabbed her, they did not try to steal her soul . . . they merely took her to the oblivion of sleep.

•   •   •

She dreamed—and her dreams were crazy. A collage of images that made no sense.

At one point she was inside a strange metal box made from sheets of aluminum soldered together to form a perfect square. She was alone, lying there, staring up at the cold metal ceiling, but then she turned her head and realized that she was actually lying on a hospital gurney—and the box was not a box . . . but something much more sinister . . . a giant metal oven.

She lifted her head, her chin pressing into her throat, and ahead of her she could see an observation window cut into the metal. There were men in camouflage fatigues standing on the other side of the window, staring at her, the assault rifles in their hands trained on her through the glass. She tried to sit up further, but her ankles and wrists were bound to the hospital gurney by stiff metal cuffs that cut into her skin, drawing a circle of blood in the flesh.

She blinked and her world shifted . . .

Now she stood on a slender wooden dock that was shrouded in a thick, gray fog that blotted out the landscape around her. Glowing orbs of light stood like sentinels on either side of the deck, providing the only illumination visible in the fog. She reached out with both hands and discovered that the orbs were actually candles, their flames flickering in the wind. She looked up, but there was no moon to light the sky. Only a velvety black cover that seemed to spread out above her for eternity. She felt cold, goose bumps breaking out on her arms and legs—and when she looked down, she was surprised to find herself naked and not wearing her own skin. The body she was clothed in was utterly alien to her, its curves of rounded flesh unrecognizable. She didn’t try to understand what had happened to her. She just stared down at the curling mound of soft pubic hair, the wide hips and flat stomach, the whiskey-colored skin that gleamed with glittery flecks of gold as she stood in the soft glow of the candlelight.

She reached down and touched her new belly, pressing her long fingers into the softness of the flesh. It was a sensual feeling. Like she was touching herself . . . but not touching herself—and it felt both thrilling and taboo.

She felt soft fingertips drop onto her bare shoulder, this new flesh molding onto hers, and she turned her head. She had no idea what her borrowed face looked like, but she imagined it as beautiful and feminine with soft full lips and expressive brown eyes. A tall, bare-chested man stood behind her, the length of his body sliding up against her, her ass pressing into the length of his manhood. She tried to find his face, but here things got bizarre. The man’s body was human from the neck down, but he wore a ghastly, skeletal stag’s-head mask over his head.

She tried to move away from him, disgusted by the animal musk that exuded from the man/death stag’s body, but he held her fast. He caught her up in his arms and lifted her into the air, carrying her with him as he strode down the deck. She wanted to fight him, didn’t like the aggressive way he held her, but when she opened her mouth to protest, he silenced her with a kiss, his long black stag’s tongue laced with a poison that burned her mouth.

Daniela realized that this was some kind of bastardized version of the Horned God ritual. Usually, this magical rite—an induction ceremony, really—occurred when a blood sister first joined her coven and spiritually gave herself to the Horned God as a way of binding herself to the sisterhood. It was a beautiful moment in every blood sister’s initiation, and Daniela hated that it was being twisted in this nasty way.

She beat her fists against his chest, the foul scent of animal filling her nostrils, and he bent his antlered head toward her face, slipping the same thick animal tongue back into her mouth again. She gagged, unable to stop him as he bit at her lips, fur and something that was not teeth, but maybe a hard palate, grinding against her mouth.

He finally pulled away from her and when she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a silken bed, soft down pillows fluffed around her nude body. The death stag was poised above her, naked now, his giant throbbing cock angled toward her nether regions. She dragged herself away, not wanting anything to do with the creature or his giant penis. He reached for her middle, and she knew he was going to try to flip her over so he could have his way with her from behind. She did the only thing she could think of to save herself. She grabbed the death stag’s skeletal white antlers and yanked on them, pulling his head toward her chest. The antlers—no, the whole death stag’s head—came away in her hands, the sharpened tips embedding themselves into her chest.

She gasped as pain flooded her body, rivulets of warm blood spilling down her naked breasts. She reached up and pulled the antlers from her chest, letting them drop onto the bed beside her. She stared down at the gory twin wounds cut into her skin, and then she pressed her palms against them, trying to stanch the flow of her lifeblood out onto the sheets.

When she finally tore her gaze away from all the blood and looked up, she found a grinning human skull staring down at her. She tried to speak, to ask the beast why he’d done this to her, but its empty eye sockets beckoned her to follow it into death. She shook her head, not wanting to go but also not able to fully resist. She couldn’t think straight. Had lost too much blood. The whole bed was sticky with the stuff.

She reached up a hand, fingers digging into the skull’s mouth, trying to yank away its lower jaw—but it bit her and she began to cry. After a few moments, it released the fleshy digits and she let the hand fall back to her chest, slipping on the slickness there, unable to keep her hands pressed against the wound any longer.

The skull lowered itself toward her face, grinning as it came close and closer . . .

•   •   •

She woke up after the first real sleep she’d had since they’d left Echo Park for Italy. In her mind, it all seemed like years, decades, centuries ago . . . she felt old and wizened, no longer a young woman. A husk of her former self.

She felt all this and she hadn’t even opened her eyes yet.

The weight of the past and the future were already pushing down on her, dragging her back toward things she wished she could forget.

Not wanting to be awake but knowing she had to rejoin the world, she asked her eyes to open, and this time they obeyed her. Light flooded in, blinding her—and the morning sunlight was so bright that tears began to course down her cheeks, not attached to any emotion. She blinked back the wetness, reaching up to discover that one hand was tethered to an IV drip, so she used the other to brush away the salty tears. At first, she thought she was alone, but she quickly realized this was not the case. A woman with uncombed brown hair sat in a plush chair directly across from Daniela’s hospital bed. Her eyes were closed, left elbow crooked on the arm of the chair so her chin rested on the back of her hand. She was creamy skinned with a spray of freckles dotting her nose. Her dark lashes splayed fetchingly across the top of her cheeks as she slumbered.

With clumsy fingers, Daniela grabbed the top of the sheet that covered her, raising it toward her face to blot away the last of her tears. She hated the way they felt, hated how their warmth disappeared almost as soon as they hit the air, leaving her skin chilled.

“You’re awake.”

She looked up to find the woman staring at her, forest-green eyes appraising Daniela’s face, their warmth almost hidden under a fringe of long lashes. She was thin, collarbones protruding from the V-neck of her white T-shirt, and she had long arms, which she now looped around jeans-clad knees as she lifted her feet up onto the seat of the chair. While Daniela watched, the woman made herself smaller, folding up her arms and legs like human origami until she was a neatly wrapped package of exposed feet, head, and torso.

“Neat,” Daniela rasped, her throat hoarse and sore from whatever tubes had been stuck down there to keep her alive and breathing.

The woman smiled, but it was slight and fleeting.

“I was asleep,” the other woman said, her voice pitched higher than before. “I wasn’t supposed to do that. Fall asleep, that is.”

Nervous, Daniela thought. I make her nervous.

“S’okay,” Daniela said, her own voice cracking. “Won’t tell.”

“I’m Niamh.”

The woman began to rock back and forth in the chair, like a child, eyes downcast.

“Dan . . . iela,” Daniela croaked.

“I know.”

“Lyse . . .”

“She and Arrabelle and Evan . . . Well, I’m on watch until they get back.”

There was a tentative quality to Niamh’s voice, a sadness that Daniela remembered from before. This was the voice she hadn’t recognized. This was the creature who had opened the well of sadness and almost dropped Daniela into the abyss.

A dark gray shadow coalesced around Niamh, a living aura unlike anything Daniela had ever seen before. It raged around the woman like a maelstrom, sparks of black fire shooting out like tentacles, searching for a hold on Daniela’s soul. Fear coursed through Daniela’s body, adrenaline snaking like fire in her veins. She tried to sit up, but she was too weak.

“No . . .” she moaned, shaking her head.

Niamh began to unwrap herself, worry creasing her brow.

“You okay?”

“Stay away,” Daniela said, flinching as Niamh and her hungry aura climbed out of the chair and moved to the other side of the hospital bed.

“What? Why?” Niamh asked, confused.

Daniela tried to cower away from her, to put as much space between them as she could, but there was only so much real estate.

“Are you all right?” Niamh asked, reaching out a hand.

Daniela squeezed her eyes tight, bracing for the worst, but when nothing happened, she opened them again. She saw that Niamh had retracted her hand, staring down at her fingers as if they were diseased.

“I—I’m sorry.” She stumbled over her words . . . and the gray aura began to fade.

Daniela forced herself to un-grit her jaw and relax. Niamh seemed to intuitively understand that she needed to stay as far away from Daniela as possible. Whatever atrocity had befallen the woman had opened up her psyche like a cracked nut, the shell split in two and all the raw meat glistening on display. She was an open wound, a veritable trap for any empath. Touch someone like Niamh, who’d been damaged that badly, and you’d get sucked down into the abyss.

“I . . .” Daniela began, wanting to explain, but at that moment a slender man with horn-rimmed spectacles pushed open the door.

“You’re up,” he said, setting a coffee cup on the ledge of the nearest window and moving to Daniela’s bedside. “And you don’t look like death warmed over anymore.”

She was used to Arrabelle’s blunt honesty, but she didn’t appreciate it from someone she didn’t know.

“Who are you?” Daniela rasped, her voice shot.

“I’m Arrabelle’s friend Evan, and Niamh is my coven mate.”

The pieces began to fall into place. Her mind flashed back to Devandra’s house, to the Mucho Man Cave and to the last time their coven had all been together . . . might be the last time that they were all together. She remembered that Arrabelle’s friend Evan had reached out to warn Arrabelle about the danger from The Flood. That Arrabelle had left her coven mates behind to go and rescue him.

Well, it seemed that Arrabelle had accomplished what she’d set out to do.

The young woman, Niamh, stopped just shy of Daniela, not wanting to get too close.

“Since you’ve been comatose, a lot of things have changed,” she began, turning to look at Evan.

“And not for the better,” Evan interrupted, resting his hands on the bed’s metal guardrail.

“Where’s Lizbeth?” Daniela rasped, almost crying with gratitude when Evan plucked a plastic cup of water from the side table and handed it to her. She sipped the cool liquid, her raw throat feeling a bit better. “I saw her . . . in my dreams . . .”

“She’s gone. Somewhere in the dreamlands,” Niamh said—and Daniela felt a deep worry in her heart.

“What aren’t you telling me?” She wanted them to give her all the bad news at once. Otherwise, it would just draw out the pain.

“The world has changed . . .” Niamh paused. “Your coven mate Lizbeth brought magic back into the world through her dreams.”

“But humanity’s not taking it very well,” Evan added.

Daniela’s heart sank. She couldn’t help but feel responsible. She was the idiot who’d trusted Desmond Delay—that traitor—and unwittingly sold out her blood sisters to him. In her defense, she really had been in the dark. But ignorance was not an excuse. She, of all people—a fucking empath—should’ve known better. Maybe if she’d been smarter, she’d have controlled Lizbeth better and worked out a way to share the dream gradually . . . to manipulate the flow of information and allow humanity time to process it properly. Everyone was highly aware that human beings were bad at dealing with the unknown. Humans loved to shoot first and ask questions later.

Weeks before the insanity had begun—before Lyse had even left Athens, Georgia, and come home to look after a dying Eleanora—Devandra had drawn a tarot spread that intimated there was a Judas among the Echo Park coven.

The spread had been a simple one:

The World

The Magician

The Hierophant

The Devil

The Fool

No one knew who The Fool belonged to, but it turned out to be Daniela’s card. She was the Judas—

As if something hot and blazing had been conjured into life by her thoughts, Daniela saw orangey-red flames flare up in her peripheral vision. When she turned her head, she saw that Niamh’s body had been engulfed in flame.

“You’re on fire,” Daniela said, as she stared at Niamh—though it had only taken her a moment to realize that Niamh wasn’t on fire. Her aura was burning so bright.

“What’re you talking about?” Niamh said, her eyes wide and scared.

“Your aura, it’s burning up.”

And I’m terrified of what all that anger would do to me if I ever touched you, Daniela thought.

Niamh closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The orange-red glow instantly began to fade away.

“Better?” Niamh asked, opening her eyes.

Daniela nodded.

“I’ve never . . . I couldn’t see auras before,” Daniela said.

“It’s the magic returning to our world,” Evan replied. “It’s making everyone’s powers manifest in new ways.” He turned to Daniela. “You’re an empath, so why shouldn’t you start seeing auras, or at least some kind of visual manifestation of the emotions you feel when you touch someone.”

She felt herself nodding. What Evan said made sense—the gray and orangey-red changes in Niamh’s aura had to be manifestations of Niamh’s sadness and anger. If the negative emotions she felt from Niamh could hurt her, she wondered, would the positive ones—like love or joy—act in the opposite way? She wanted to try her theory out, but there was so much else to discuss, so many things that she needed to know. And she was already worn out from this minor interaction with Niamh and Evan. In fact, her eyes were already starting to close.

“Daniela?” she heard Evan say, but she didn’t answer. She was already drifting to sleep . . . and out of their reality.

•   •   •

“Hi, Daniela,” Lizbeth said. “You’re in the dreamlands. Sort of.”

Her friend sat in front of her, cross-legged on the floor, her long russet hair tied back in a loose braid. She was wearing a white shift dress that exposed her thin arms and delicate shoulders, but Daniela was not deceived by the delicate image Lizbeth presented. The Dream Keeper was anything but fragile. She was imbued with so much power that Daniela could see it sparking off the teenager’s body in streaks of shining gold.

“You brought me here,” Daniela said, realizing—after the fact—that the pain in her throat was gone. She looked down and saw that she was in a matching shift dress to Lizbeth’s, her own short hair a frazzled purple-and-pink rat’s nest.

They were sitting in a room that was the color of bone. It wasn’t a place Daniela had ever been before, and the coldness that emanated from the space, the crisp emptiness that filled the room, made her shiver.

“I did bring you here,” Lizbeth said. “I wanted you to know that Dev’s girls are here with me and Eleanora and Hessika. They’re safe for now, but they can’t stay forever.”

“Dev’s girls are with you, okay,” Daniela replied, nodding. “Even though I have no idea why Dev would let them out of her sight . . .”

Lizbeth’s face fell.

“Not enough time. Just tell them that I have to stay here to learn to use my powers—but the girls can’t stay. We will all be with the magicians at the Red Chapel—”

“The magicians? At the Red Chapel?” Daniela interrupted, her confusion growing.

Lizbeth nodded.

“I know it doesn’t make sense right now, but just remember what I say. Go to the Red Chapel. It’s a real place in our world and in the dreamlands. We will be there with the girls. But go soon. As soon as you can. It won’t be safe for them here for long.”

“Who are the magicians?” Daniela asked as she tried to commit Lizbeth’s words to memory.

“The brothers. Tem and Thomas,” she said, a secret smile pulling on the corners of her lips. “They’re magicians. They’re going to teach me how to use the powers I have—”

“And Eleanora and Hessika are okay with all this?” Daniela asked.

Lizbeth frowned.

“They don’t like it. But they understand why it’s necessary. They’re taking care of the girls. When you find Marji and Ginny, you’ll find Eleanora and Hessika, too. If I don’t see you again, I love you and the others. Tell them I said that!”

“I will, but why wouldn’t we see you again—” Daniela started to ask, but Lizbeth only shook her head.

“You’re about to wake up. Remember . . . the Red Chapel—”

•   •   •

Daniela opened her eyes.

“Lizbeth, tell me . . .”

But Lizbeth was gone.

Daniela sat up in her hospital bed.

“What’s wrong?” Niamh asked—she and Evan were still standing by the side of the bed. For them, time had barely inched forward; for Daniela . . . it was like she’d been asleep for centuries.

“We have to go,” Daniela said—sending a silent thank-you to Lizbeth for somehow making the fix on her throat cross over into the real world. “The Red Chapel. Dev’s girls are there waiting for us.”

She didn’t stop to call a nurse to remove her IV. She simply yanked the needle from her hand—blood flying—and threw the tubes onto the bedclothes. She dragged herself off the mattress, her feet hitting the cold tile floor and sending shivers up her spine.

“The Red Chapel? We know it . . . of course, we do . . . but it burned down—” Niamh began, but Daniela cut her off.

“Don’t ask questions,” she said, hunting for her old clothes. She found her pants and a clean T-shirt in the chest of drawers. “Just go get the others.”

As Niamh shot out the door, Daniela slipped her pants over her bare legs, her body shivering with the cold.

“What did you see?” Evan asked—and Daniela could tell that he wished he could help her get ready. But she was an empath. No one could touch her.

“I saw Lizbeth. She’s in the dreamlands with Dev’s girls. She said we need to go to the Red Chapel. That the girls would be there waiting for us . . . and she said they wouldn’t be safe there for long.”

“Jesus . . .” Evan said.

“Exactly . . .” Daniela replied. “I just hope we’re not too late already.”