Enlightened (Love and Light Series) (38 page)

~~~~~~~~~~~

Loti woke to murmuring shadows all around her against a brilliant corridor of white light. Blinking, she shaded her eyes with a hand. One of those voices stood out from the others.

“Gramom?” Her grandmother’s blue eyes drifted closer and then her beautiful face, so young, hovered over hers.

“Loti, sweetie.” And she was in her grandmother’s arms, crying and laughing. When Loti released her, her face swam back into focus.

“You’re young.” She laughed.

Gramom stepped away as another shadow walked out of white fog.

“Pop pop? Oh my god.” And she jumped to her feet, squeezing him tight. He looked thirty years old again, like she’d only seen in sepia-toned pictures.

“Peanut.” He kissed her cheek, and she was startled when he didn’t smell of Old Spice or Lucky Strikes—or the beer on his breath.

“Loti?” A small, tentative voice came from behind her. She spun around.

“Calla?” She sobbed, falling on her baby sister. The two held each other for a long time, rocking together with little hiccups and sighs. “I’m so, so sorry, Calla.” Loti kept saying.

“Shhh,” Calla patted her back. “It wasn’t for you to save me.”

Sobs wracked Loti’s chest and tore open her heart. She clutched her sister, hacking and coughing.

“Hey, Loti.”

Calla unlaced their arms and stepped aside. Loti wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands until she could make out David’s smile and his handsome face. Full and square-jawed, not sharp and angular like it was at the end. Loti gulped, frozen. He ran fingers down her cheek.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.”

She collapsed into his arms, and though she thought there were no more sobs or tears or hiccups left, more came.

“Shhh.” He smoothed her hair, resting his cheek against her crown. “It’s okay, baby.”

Years passed in his arms, and she calmed, the sobs turning to hiccups, the hiccups to mere sniffs. His arms strong like she remembered, before the cancer, held her up as the heavy metal of grief and the poison of guilt drained away. She never wanted to lift her head again because she knew that the end would come. He would leave.

“Don’t be afraid to love him,” David said. “Let me go. But no matter what anyone ever tells you, I loved you from the start.”

She lifted her head, a tightness around her eyes. He’d said something similar before he died. His eyes radiated love, and her confusion melted into a peaceful smile.

“Okay,” she whispered.

He nodded, satisfied, and released her. His hand hovered in the air as he backed away, turned to go, and then jerked back.

“Patrick.” He pointed a finger at her and narrowed his eyes. “It was Patrick.” And then he vanished.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Wolf followed Loti’s fading presence back to the warehouse. He landed on the roof and ran for the side, leaping over its edge and slamming into the cement. He glanced unseeing at the gathering by the front door and tore the unlocked door off its hinges with a metallic scream and leaped through. At the other end of the warehouse, another metal door barred his way, and he struggled to tear it from the wall—this one was twice as thick and the locks and hinges fought back. Straining, the veins in his neck popping and his eyes bulging, the door frame reluctantly screeched apart.

“AH,” His desperate voice echoed in the cavernous dark.

She was no longer in his head. Just a fuzzy presence brushed against his mind, almost gone.
Why? Why is she fading?
She shouldn’t be dying. It made no sense. When there was an opening big enough he squeezed through, the jagged metal tearing a ragged strip of cotton from his shirt. As he ran down the long corridor the air condensed around him, and he shoved against the magic shield Patrick had erected. He fought for every inch, one foot in front of the other in slow motion like he was in a great wind tunnel.

“Loti!” he yelled, his face twisted and gathered around itself.

With every ounce of preternatural strength he had, he fought the wall of magic, bursting through and flying against the last door in the unlit hallway. He dropped down the four flights of stairs, falling between the rails, and landed in a crouch. He flew down the corridor to the last door, blasting through without stopping. The door clanged and banged against the opposite wall, barely missing Loti’s still form on the floor. Her head lulled to one side, an ugly bruise growing over both cheekbones, and a bloody pulp where her nose should have been. Her hair spilled around her, her arms splayed to either side of her head, elbows bent, and hands limp by her face. He fell on her, cradling her to him. Her head hung back, hair brushing the floor. Sitting back on his heels, he held his head to her chest. One heartbeat. His heart stopped. Alive. Barely.

“Loti?” he whispered into her ear. “Loti, I love you.”

A bloody tear puddled on his upper lip. He cupped the back of her head with his hand, lifting her face to his.
She’s cold
. He panted against the rising panic. Trembling, he pressed a tender kiss to her cool lips. When she didn’t respond, he screwed his eyes shut, a fine trembling in his chest.

She swallowed.

“Loti?”

Her lips parted.
Kiss me, again

He kissed her, and she breathed in. Something thick and warm slid up his throat, glided over his tongue, and into her mouth. She inhaled again, deeper, her belly expanding. He opened his mouth, giving whatever it was room. More of it slid from him to her. While they kissed, she came to life, wrapping eager arms around his neck. He held her tighter, his grateful hands running over her warming body. When they pulled away from each other, Loti’s eyes roiled with dark and light like liquid obsidian. Wolf ran his fingers over her bruised cheeks. The bruises faded before his eyes, the wad of blood and tissue knitting together, reforming her upturned nose. A smile lit up her face and eyes.

“I love you, too.”

Katie set the stack of collapsed cardboard boxes on the kitchen table, looking around Patrick’s tiny apartment. She never understood why he didn’t buy a house. What was the point of wasting all that money on rent when he could have invested it in a home? Rachel and Loti carried more flat boxes through the kitchen archway. There was a sharp knock on the front door, and Katie trotted through the sparsely furnished living room.

“Professor Canon. Please come in.” Katie opened the apartment door wide.

“No, Katie, I’m just here to deliver a message. I wouldn’t want to intrude.” He cleared his throat, an envelope clutched in his pudgy hand.

“What was so important you had to track me down here?” Her brow pinched at the sight of the envelope.

“Patrick asked me to give this to you in the event he passed.” He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief. “I thought maybe he found out he had cancer. I had no idea . . . ”

“None of us did, Roger.” Katie’s hand trembled as it grasped the envelope with the university’s return address. She fingered its smoothness, her eyes clouding.

“I’ll be going now.” He gave a small, nervous smile.

“Have you read it?” she blurted out.

He tilted his chin up with a slight huff. “Of course not, Katie. I would never.”

She nodded and smiled sadly, “Of course, Roger. I know you wouldn’t do that. I don’t know why—”

He cleared his throat again. “Well, I’ve kept my promise. If you’ll excuse me.” And he scurried in a jerky way down the hallway as if he was trying to walk, but his legs would have none of that. Katie leaned out the door looking after him, and then her eyes fell back to the envelope as she absently shut the door. Her name was scrawled across the envelope in Patrick’s pointy script.

“What is it, Nanny?” Rachel stood in the middle of the living room, rubbing the heels of her hands over her hip bones. Loti stepped up to Katie and peered at the envelope.

“Is it from Patrick?” she asked.

Katie nodded, eyes still glued to the envelope as she walked to the kitchen. The girls trailed after her, as if they’d rather not, but couldn’t stop themselves. She sat down in one of the rummage sale kitchen chairs. Resting elbows on the table, she pinched the corners of the envelope between the thumb and forefingers of each hand. She tapped it several times on the Formica table top before sliding a finger nail under the edge of the sealed flap, ripping it down the short side. Squeezing the long edges, she blew into the opening. She slid several pages of university stationary out and unfolded then. Her eyes ran across the page several times before they watered and spilled over, several tears spotting the handwritten letter. The papers shook as one hand wiped at the tears.

“I can’t read it, Rachel,” Katie cried. “Damn it.” She wiped harder.

“Here, Nanny. Let me.” Rachel took the letter from her and began to read:

My dearest Katie,

If you are reading this, I hope that it means things have worked out as best as they could, and I am dead and you and Rachel are safe. Thank the Divine. I hope I had the chance to tell you in person how much I loved you. The Divine knows how much I've tried not to, but I've learned that once you decide to love someone, you can never take it back.

You must be very confused about how your best friend could suddenly become an evil warlock—like a dark force from a scary fairytale. I can't give you any easy answers or reasons or concise explanations. All I can do is tell you the story of how I came to this. Isn't that all any of us can do in the end—tell our story? We can make excuses, we can elaborate and pontificate, but the truth lies in our history, each step we took along our personal path.

It started all those years ago when we were young and foolish—when we thought we could do anything, damn the consequences. You remember that night. I'm sure, like me, not a day has gone by for you that you don't at least touch that day with your mind—a whisper or a shadow brings you back there and you think, "But for a broken shoelace, it could have all been different." But it was what it was. We played with forces we didn't understand, and we cast the circle in the basement at midnight.

The portal opened, and you were sucked away. You never could bring yourself to tell us what it was like there, and we never pressed for answers. That scar on your thigh haunted me always. We tried to bring you back right away, but the portal winked out of existence as soon as you were gone. You know what we told you, that we ran to Professor Wesley for help that night, but what we didn’t tell you was how he dropped his head in his hands and cried. I think my heart stopped right then.

We spent two days searching through old grimoires, while Professor Wesley made calls to friends and associates asking guarded questions for help. By the end of the second day, we were desperately terrified, and maybe that’s what Modore was waiting for. A man showed up and called himself Professor Doremo, and gave a name—some mutual friend of Professor Wesley’s—saying he had a solution, but it would require a promise from Joe and me. Wesley gave him an emphatic no for an answer, but Doremo impressed upon us that we better hurry because where you had gone, time worked differently.

We thought the worst, of course, that you might die of old age or starvation or at the hands of some monster before we figured out how to get you back. Doremo gave us his card to contact him, if we changed our minds, he said. When he left, Wesley said in no uncertain terms that we were not to contact the man, but he’d said the right things, or wrong things, to frighten us.

When Wolf showed up later that night, we had already made up our minds. We told him what happened, as you know, but we left out the part about Doremo. I don’t know why, Katie. Maybe in the backs of our minds we thought he would try to stop us, and he would have. Of course, Doremo was Modore, and I learned later that Wolf knew Modore from his freedom-fighting days. Choices, Katie. It’s all about choices.

We contacted him ourselves, against Wesley’s wishes and without Wolf’s knowledge, and he met us in the same library basement. He extracted a blood oath from us—that we would be beholden to him for the rest of our lives. If we betrayed him, then whoever we loved the most would die. And we were both in love with you, my dear. Always were. We swore the oath as we drank his blood, and I felt the magic bind my soul, Katie. I swear I felt it crawl inside my heart and bed down. It has remained, a dark thing roaming my soul, choking me all of my life, but Modore kept his word and walked us through the spell to bring you back.