The ritual.
Oh, crap.
Aidan’s ritual by the coven to try and trap the creature.
Aidan.
I glance at my watch and groan.
“Oh, crud—we’re supposed to stop by Aidan’s shop tonight for the weekly meditation circle,” I tell Virago, jerking my thumb back to the car.
“Who knows,” I tell her, uncertainty making my words soft, “maybe he can track the beast with some witchy magic or something?”
Virago’s lips twitch up at the corners, and then she glances down at the chipped concrete beneath our feet as a smile takes over her entire face.
She tries to hide it but fails as she glances back up at me, her blue eyes smoldering.
“Or something,” she agrees companionably, taking my arm in a gentle hand and threading it through hers as we make our way back to the car.
From the back seat, Carly watches our interactions, barely keeping her glee to herself as she pretends to fiddle with the camera, but is not-so-secretly grinning widely and trying to hide it with her hand.
But no matter what, I’ve got to keep my head in the game.
We have the beast to find.
There’s Nicole and a host of other problems looming.
But still.
This moment.
This moment right here is good.
No matter what happens next, I’ve had this moment and all the ones leading up to it.
That has to be enough.
Right?
“Now, everyone, take hold of the hand of the person next to you.
Together, we create this never-ending circle of energy that keeps us safe in this place.
Safe to explore the deepest parts of ourselves—safe to explore our own inner depths.”
I open one of my tightly closed eyes and peek at my brother.
The rest of the people in the meditation circle are calmly seated on the brightly-painted wooden folding chairs in the circle, each holding the hands of the people on either side of them tightly, eyes closed, chins up, deeply breathing as they began to sink into a light meditative state.
My brother’s in rare form tonight.
I mean, he’s usually pretty theatrical about these kinds of things.
He’s always told me that you need rituals and meditations to have a certain kind of production about them, full of the mystery and good energy that’s made the idea of magic survive the entire time that people have existed.
He’s intoning the words now in his deep voice, softening them so that his words are light enough to follow, but still something you can let go of once you get into a deep meditative state, following your own intuition and the messages that the universe supposedly sends you.
Virago’s seated to my right, and she’s gripping my hand tightly.
Much tighter than the guy to my left, the one with the short beard, whose name I can never remember.
Virago’s fingers in mine make me think about things I shouldn’t be thinking about.
Mainly about her reveal today that she used to have a girlfriend.
A lover.
A
woman
.
Her grip is so strong, her hand warm and sure around mine that I can’t
help
but think about these things.
I
should
be trying to imagine world peace or something.
But all I can think about is this gorgeous woman, holding my hand.
But the truth is that this weekly meditation circle isn’t gathered for world peace tonight.
We’ve met together to try and open the portal to her world just to see if we can do it.
We’re
not
gathered here so that I can sit and stare at her out of slitted eyes that should actually be closed so that I can start to meditate.
I cast one last, tiny glance at her, at her raised chin, at her serene profile, and then I close my own eyes again, let out the tiniest of sighs.
“I want you all, tonight, to relax,” my brother says quietly, his voice drifting in a soothing lull over us.
“And I want you to imagine, in the very center of our circle tonight, a bright white circle of light.
I want you to imagine a door.”
There’s a very good chance that this won’t work, my brother warned Virago.
Aidan had looked so worried when he’d brought it up to her earlier, biting at his lip and trying to be as frank as possible with her as he could.
But she assured him that it was wonderful for him to even try to help.
That she appreciated his efforts.
That she couldn’t do this alone and any help we could give her would be mightily appreciated, no matter the outcome.
And then she’d sat down in the circle with the rest of us.
And Aidan, who’d already briefed his coven-members of the task at hand, had sat down at the other end of the circle and begun.
He’d begun, in fact, just like this was a regular meditation.
The kind of meditation where we visualize sending good energy (usually in the form of white light we raise together) to people in hospitals or the Middle East.
But this isn’t a regular night or meditation.
We’ve never, for example, concentrated on the center of the floor in front of us, visualizing a door to
another world
.
My heart begins to beat more quickly.
There’ll be no relaxation achieved tonight.
Virago grips my hand tightly, her wide, strong palm pressed against my own, the solidity of her skin, her warmth, drawing me in, so that I’m mostly concentrating on where we connect.
No, no.
I take a deep breath, try to clear my head.
I imagine a circle of white light on the center of the floor in front of us.
I imagine it glowing brightly.
I imagine it so bright that, even though my eyes are closed, the darkness of the room—lit by a single candle on the goddess altar behind Aidan—becomes so light, light as day in fact, that I have to open my eyes so that I can see what’s going on.
That’s strange.
The room is actually a whole lot brighter than I remember it being behind my eyelids.
I open my eyes just a little, now, just to take another peek.
In the center of the floor in front of us, exactly like I’d imagined it in my mind’s eye, is a circle comprised entirely of white light.
“Oh, my God,” the guy in the beard next to me whispers.
“Keep concentrating, everyone,” my brother intones, but you can tell by his enormous grin that he’s ecstatic.
I can’t believe it myself.
We did this.
This isn’t some airy fairy new age imagining of sending good energy to someone who may, or may not, ever feel that good energy or have something good happen to them because of it.
This is real.
This is physical.
There is actual
white light
in the center of the floor in a circle.
It’s…
real.
Virago is rising, smoothly, her hand gently unclasping a little from mine, but not letting it go.
She straightens gracefully and takes two firm steps across the floor between her seat and the white light.
She peers down and into the circle.
Because she hasn’t let go of my hand, I follow her rising unsteadily to my feet and wobbling over to peer down into the circle, too, and beard guy follows me.
Everyone’s actually standing and coming closer now, to peer down into the white light…
But when you peer down into it, you realize that it’s not white light anymore.
It’s a portal.
A portal to Virago’s world.
The portal in the floor looks a little like I’m staring down into a manhole, but I’m not…I’m staring down into another world that’s about ten feet below us.
It’s night down there, just like it is here.
And it also appears to be summer.
There’s tall grass on the ground, and the air is rich with the heady scent of unfamiliar flowers.
It’s a meadow, what we’re looking down on.
There are trees ringing it, I can see a little, off to the right—pines, by the looks of them.
But that’s really not the most interesting part.
Because in the center of the portal, straight down, standing on that meadow and among those flowers, are four knights.
The only reason that I know they’re knights is because they’re wearing identical armor to what Virago was wearing when she came with the beast onto my lawn.
Two of the knights standing below are women.
Two of them are men.
All of them have their equally long hair pulled up into a tight ponytail, with wolf’s tails hanging from each one, blending in with their regular hair.
The knights wear fur capelets, and have broadswords in worn leather scabbards hanging on their backs.
And they’re all staring up at us in consternation, their mouths open in shock, eyes wide as they stare up through the portal into
our
world…which probably does look pretty strange to them.
“Magel?” says Virago in a hushed whisper.
Then she’s shouting it:
“Magel!”
“Virago!” thunders the tallest woman back.
She has bright red hair that falls in waves down her back from her ponytail, and even though it’s night and quite dark wherever this is, I can still see her eyes flashing in that darkness as she raises her arm toward us.
She reaches out her hand to Virago as she shouts: “have you slain the beast, sister?”
Virago lets out a small sigh beside me, but then she’s shaking her head, grimacing.
“No.
Not yet.
There were…complications.
But there is hope that within two days, the beast will be vanquished and plague us and no living creature evermore.”
“Do you have what you need to complete this task?” asks the woman—Magel, I suppose her name is.
Her jaw clenches as she stares up at us.
She no longer looks as happy as she did a moment ago.
“Are you being assisted by knights?”
“No,” says Virago clearly, “but those who help me are just as brave and good.
I will prevail, sister.
I will return soon, triumphant.”
“May the goddess go with you…” Magel is saying, but her voice seems to be getting smaller—more distant—and then the white light ringing the portal begins to fade.
As the light flickers, what we see before us in the portal begins to flicker as the white light dies.
In an instant, the scent of summer meadow is abruptly gone, and so is the portal in front of us, the white light flickering and dying completely now, leaving an afterimage of a circle when we close our eyes.
Like the light of the portal, the small candle on the altar flickers and goes out, too, plunging us into utter darkness.
Everyone’s silent for a long moment.
Until:
“Did we just…did we really just experience that?” a woman in the darkness whispers in hushed tones.
I can hear someone fumbling around in the dark, and then Aidan flicks the lights back on.
The paintings on the walls look so fluorescent under the Christmas tree lights around the edges of the ceiling, and we all look sallow, pale, and more than a little in shock as we all stare at one another.
“Yes,” says Aidan, sounding more surprised than me.
“That actually
did
just happen.”
We’re all looking to Virago now.
“Thank you so much for your help, my friends,” she tells us, inclining her head to us and pressing her fist over her heart as she breathes out.
“It was good to see my fellow knights again.
That they have stayed, waiting for me—that they have not forsaken me.
That I know, now, that you can open a portal…this is all great news.
We
can
trap the beast.
I know it now.”
Her low voice ends on a growl.
She turns her attentions to Aidan, her bright blue eyes flashing.
“Next time, the portal must open to a place between worlds, if you can muster it.
That will keep everyone safe.”
Aidan shrugs his shoulders, still grinning hugely.
“I mean, I don’t even know how I just did that.
We just opened a
portal
, I mean that’s some seriously intense shit right there.”
He shrugs, shoves his hands deep into his jeans pockets.
“Honestly, I think it had something to do with you, Virago—that you helped steer the energy into creating the portal or something.
I mean, I don’t know how else to explain it.”
He shrugs again, turns his smile onto his coven members.
“All right, time for tea and cookies, everyone!
Let’s ground ourselves after that out of this world meditative experience!”
I hang back as the coven members gather along the folding table pushed up against the far wall, practically groaning under the weight of canisters of hot water and Styrofoam plates covered in store-bought cookies.
Virago remains with me.