Talk about awesome magic.
THE END
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Sneak Peek of Forgotten Magic
Magic is elemental. It’s a full-bodied thread in all that we are. To me, to all my folk—witches and wizards of every make and the other supernatural creatures that co-exist in our ley line-loving world—magic simply is.
It was magic that lived deep inside me, hidden beneath the wretch of who I’d been, of what I’d done ten years ago at age eighteen. My father would call me a hypocrite— if we were still talking. He’d tell me that keeping myself from the covens in New York and from my family back in Crimson Cove, keeping myself from the life he taught me to be proud of, was a coward’s way.
I was a witch only when it served my purposes.
Like now, slipping inside the dreams of such a talented writer. My client, Ivanna Ride (pseudonym, of course), was the hottest thing in erotic romance. She outsold and out published even the most popular authors and she did it on her own. There was no major house working behind her. Just Ivanna, her clever English-nerd husband, and me, Janiver Benoit, graphic artist extraordinaire. Well, that might be pushing it. It was magic that made me extraordinary and it was my gifts that helped me slip inside Ivanna’s mind and discover the theme, the vibe, the truly disturbing imagery she saw when she dreamt of her characters.
This time around it was Kjel, the 1050 A.D. Viking warrior in love with an enemy clan leader’s daughter. Blood and war and lots of sex. That’s what I had to make come to life on the cover of her book.
Walking inside Ivanna’s mind was like taking a stroll through a Renaissance Fair—on acid. The mist around me as I stepped into her dream was thick, a clotting smell that stuck in the back of my throat and choked me with the heavy scent of lavender. It hung in my sinuses, made my dry mouth collect with saliva. But on the back of that scent was something I recognized only vaguely as sweat. In Ivanna’s dreams, there was sex. It became apparent that’s what she had in mind, literally, when her REM cycle kicked into high gear.
Kjel—or who I took for Kjel—stood barefoot atop a bear skin rug in a rugged stone hut, glaring down at some whimpering, silly girl who looked more turned on than frightened. She was the enemy’s daughter knocking on the door of womanhood, looking at Kjel like she wanted him to guide her way through it.
With a shudder of sound and the shift of light, the scene changed and the small room with its dirt floor became a boudoir with fine, cerise linens and a massive four-poster bed. The girl’s face transformed to mimic something like Ivanna’s. At least, how she’d looked this afternoon when I listened to her babble on and on about the pending Kjel series and her vision for the rest of her books, her promo graphics, and the blog tours she wanted to organize.
I’d listened to her politely, nodding where appropriate as this mid-forties woman tucked strands of curly brown hair behind her ear. Damn. Was it petty of me to notice that there was gray flirting in those strands near her temples? She guzzled on an iced coffee as she talked, never once asking for my opinion or curious about what ideas might have come to me when I’d read the manuscript. That didn’t bother me, though, not really. My clients typically didn’t want to know what I thought. They just wanted to make sure I made magic happen on their covers and their promo materials.
Funny how close that was to the truth.
I’d listened to Ivanna for nearly an hour, sipping my own Venti English Breakfast Tea, more interested in the chipping black paint on my fingernails and the wadded napkin Ivanna had used to wipe her mouth. That would be the souvenir I’d take to give me access to her dreams.
Magic, no matter what fantasy authors or Renaissance vendors tell you, is just an old school name for the things mortals want proof of to believe. Everything we do has to be logical, must have an explanation.
It is true that there has to be basis for every spell or hex. There has to be something elemental that connects our target or, in my case, client, to the magic we twist. It isn’t simply supernatural. It’s dependent on the natural. Magic elevates it. That’s why I needed Ivanna’s napkin. It was something she’d held, something that she’d left a bit of herself behind on, and it was the element I needed to slip into her dreams.
But I didn’t like doing it—dreamwalking. Not like this. It was an invasion that made me feel cheap and simple. Intruding into someone else’s private dreams? Seeing the things they’d never freely admit to desiring? I was like some kind of perv trying to make my clients happy by copying their own imaginations.
Still, it paid the bills. So I stalked in the shadows in my client’s dreamworld. Kjel and dream Ivanna were starting to go at it. Bleaching my eyeballs was the first order of business when I woke up, which needed to happen right now. I had work to do.
I started that slow awakening, the controlled transition that would bring me out of Ivanna’s mind and back to the “real” world. It was a simple enough process—a little focus on my breathing, on the things around me. I drew upon a picture in my mind’s eye of my tiny apartment, of myself lying in only
