and then settled into her earlier relaxed rhythm. Once again her face was slack.
“No,” she said after a moment, her own voice issuing from her lips.
“One… Two…” Helen began counting.
“No,” Felicity spoke again, sharpness in her tone. “Not yet. I can’t remember it all.”
“…Five… Six…”
“NO,” my wife insisted, still staring off into space. “We have to know where she is.”
“…Nine…” Helen continued.
“NO!” Felicity barked. “I have to go back. I have to…”
She finished the sentence with an agonized cry, which caught in her throat only to be cut off mid scream. Her face suddenly contorted into a pained grimace as her body stiffened, and her hands began posturing inward.
The room filled with the sound of arcing electricity as it started to buzz and snap, and at the exact instant of the first pop, I felt the ethereal defenses I had erected begin falling away. Upon the second, they collapsed inward upon themselves as if caught in a gale force wind.
“RETURN,” Helen announced once again, this time with far more urgency.
Blind agony hammered me between the eyes, and I blinked back tears as it screwed inward toward the center of my brain. I felt my own motor control begin to slip as I flopped sideways, almost falling from the armless chair in which I was seated. Something grappled my shoulder in a tight hold, and I looked up to see Ben steadying me.
“Twilight Zone?” His words rushed past me in a distorted stream and then began repeating in a hollow echo.
A heavy bass thrum droned inside my head as I reached up with trembling hands in an attempt to contain my exploding skull. I shut my eyes tight and tried to will it away. The one clear thought that kept running through my mind was just let me die.
“ROWAN!” Ben’s voice struck my ears again, forcing their way through the heavy metal crescendo that was building in my brain.
“FELICITY! RETURN!” I heard Helen’s voice again, and it was edging toward frantic. “RETURN!”
Helen Storm was the calmest, most even-tempered person I had ever met. She didn’t get frantic.
Now I was frightened.
“Oh my god!” Agent Mandalay’s voice joined the jumble of noises. “Felicity!”
I pitched forward and forced myself to open my eyes. My wife was in the full throes of a seizure; her face was a horrid mask of pain as she shook uncontrollably, gnashing her teeth into her tongue. Pinkish froth was running from the corner of her mouth, and she bucked hard against unearthly restraints. However, that was but one of the torturous images to greet me.
Small, circular wounds had appeared randomly along her bare forearms. They were red and blistered. Oozing and charred. I’d seen pictures of wounds just like them in a brochure from a local women’s shelter. The information was about spousal abuse, and the photos were of cigarette burns.
A linear splash of blood suddenly appeared on Felicity’s t-shirt just across her left breast, spreading outward as it soaked into the cloth. I watched in horror as yet another burn mark sizzled into view on the back of her hand, appearing right before my eyes.
“JEEZUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!” Ben was yelling. “Helen! Do something!”
“She isn’t responding!” Helen returned. “She is pushing herself into it on purpose!”
I was struggling to maintain my own connection with this world, and the visual horror of the torture my wife was now going through only steeled my resolve. I forced a tenuous ground to form once again between the earth and me in an attempt to rebuild my shattered defenses. But, even as I connected, I could feel it making and breaking in a vicious cycle.
Fear was boring upward from the pit of my stomach as I fought simply to keep from slipping any further across the veil myself. I didn’t want to think about how far this could go, but my brain rifled through the scenarios anyway. I was intimately familiar with the dangers that came along with channeling those on the other side. At this very moment, each and every one of them was present and accounted for. And, leading the pack, as always, was Cerridwen. The Dark Mother, Goddess of death and rebirth. A deity to whom I had called out on many a Samhain night when celebrating the lives of loved ones long past.
But, in recent years, I had come to despise her and that for which she stood. I knew that I should not, but emotions run deeper than logic, and I could not change the way I felt.
As much as I had denied it earlier, I knew full well that my heart had stopped. Death was something I cheated every time this happened, and I would continue to duck her gelid embrace for as long as I could. But right now, as in times before, the cold bitch was waiting at the other end of this path with open arms, and Felicity was running full speed toward her.
What the darkness offered so freely was meant for me, not my wife, and I simply couldn’t allow her to get there first.
CHAPTER 19:
I had a problem, and it wasn’t a small one.
The problem being that there was absolutely nothing to stop both of us from dying if this was allowed to progress. Throwing myself into the arms of the Dark Mother, noble as it may seem, did not guarantee Felicity’s safety on this plane or any other. Given the situation, she could easily follow me right into death without so much as a pause. There was far more at work here, and while I didn’t know exactly what it was, I was determined to win out over it.
This wasn’t the time for sacrifice, and I knew that.
What I didn’t know was how I was going to make it all stop. Felicity was hell bent on finding an answer, and because of that, she was now caught up in a vortex of her own creation. She had plunged directly into this on purpose, and now I was not only fighting an overwhelming ethereal force, I was pitted against her willful determination as well. The fact is, her doggedness was probably feeding whatever it was she had connected with.
Out of pure reflex, I reached for her hand and clasped my fingers around her gnarled fist. I felt the thread of pure agony arc along my nerve endings as it raced up my arm and exploded through my body. My teeth began to involuntarily gnash as my jaw grew tight, and the sensation of holding onto a bare extension cord ripped into me just as it had the day before.
Amidst it all, however, was a new and different feeling. At first I thought it was my imagination. Nothing more than my senses thrown off kilter by the intensity of what was now happening. But, when the feeling struck for a second and then again for a third time, I knew it was more than a phantom sensation. It was real.
It came first as a tug. Next, it was a sharp jerk pulling against my arm and flowing through to the base of my skull as if some internal wire connected them to one another. Then it became a fierce pull, undulating in time with my on-again off-again connection to the earth.
What was even more surprising was that it made perfect sense to my tortured brain. It was my ground- my connection with the earth- slamming on the brakes as it attempted to shunt the energies harmlessly away. In order to stop this, I was going to have to complete that ground for the both of us and hold it fast. Unfortunately, that was an almost impossible task for me in my current state. Still, I had little choice but to at least try.
I seized on everything I had, reaching deep within myself for the strength to make it happen. I fought to push aside the stabbing pain in my head long enough to visualize a shaft of light extending from myself and deep into the center of the earth. But, just as I feared, each time I would form the vision in my head a fresh lance of agony would pierce me, and I would falter, losing both the connection and the supernatural skirmish in the process.
At some point, I think I let out a scream. I wasn’t sure because I don’t know that I actually heard it. I couldn’t tell you if it was born of pain, frustration, fear, or even a combination of all three. All I know is that whether I heard it or not, I definitely felt it deep within my soul.
I would have assumed that it was only in my mind, but for the fact that behind the deeply felt wail, I did hear Ben cry out my name. A split second later, I felt his hand briefly clamp onto my shoulder, and at that moment, a
