Blood of the Sorceress

She gazed up at the hospital, and her heart ached for her love. “Yes, my sisters. For now, yes. I would love to go home with you.”

Demetrius felt pain, and with it, relief.

He’d been in some other state, not feeling anything at all, and wondering if he’d been somehow returned to the Underworld prison, the dark, sensory-deprived void from which he’d escaped. It was similar to that, the darkness, the confusion, the mind-without-body-attached feeling. Not identical, of course, but that sense of being trapped in a dream, of trying to wake and being unable to—it had been enough to terrify him.

So when he felt the pain of his broken body, it brought a rush of relief so big that he was almost limp with it. Only then did he realize that, as miserable as this physical experience of life had been for him, he did not want it to end.

He was alive. Thank the Gods, he was still alive.

Sighing, he forced his eyes open and blinked the room around him into focus. He was in a bed, a real bed, soft and clean. There were crisp white sheets and warm blankets over him, and one arm was in a cast. He looked beyond the stranger who was sound asleep in a chair beside the bed and took in the white walls, the single window, the TV set mounted on the wall. A long curtain suspended from a track in the ceiling to his right ended his visual tour just as the sleeping stranger began stirring in his chair.

“D-man?” he asked.

Frowning, Demetrius turned his head and realized the man in the chair was no stranger after all. “Gus?” He was … he was clean. He’d shaved, gotten a haircut and was dressed in clothes that looked new. Brown trousers, with a matching suit jacket over an ivory button-down shirt without a stain in sight. “Did I wake up in some other dimension? Or am I dreaming you now?”

Gus smiled. His teeth were still stained yellow, which reassured Demetrius that they hadn’t both died and moved on to some heavenly realm.

“I’m just glad you woke up at all, boss. You feel okay?” Gus got up, went to the foot of the bed and pushed a button that raised the top part of the mattress until Demetrius was sitting up.

“I’m sore all over, but otherwise fine. I think. What is this place?”

“Hospital,” Gus said. Returning to the bedside, he poured water from a pitcher on the nightstand, held it out. “You remember what happened?”

Demetrius sipped the water, thinking, nodding, sipping some more. “I remember the car hitting me. I thought my brief stay in the physical world was over, I’ll tell you.”

“It’s just getting started, D-man. Do you remember before that? You remember the magic that started happening with those treasures of yours?”

At the mention of his sole possessions, a cold bolt of panic shot up Demetrius’s spine, and he found himself looking down, even knowing his blade and chalice couldn’t be at his waist. He pressed one hand to his chest, but his amulet was gone, as well.

“Don’t worry, boss,” Gus said. “I got your things. They’re safe and sound, and so are you.”

More memories returned in a rush, and he brought his head up to meet Gus’s eyes. “What about the woman?”

Gus glanced quickly toward that door, as if to be sure no one was listening in. Then he leaned closer. “That was something, wasn’t it? The way she just flashed into that alley, buck naked, like some kind of Terminator?”

“I don’t know the reference.” While his body seemed to have come preprogrammed with knowledge of language and customs and the ways of the world, he did, on occasion, find things lacking. Pop-culture references were topmost on the list. But mention of the woman sent another shot of ice into his blood. “Where is she?” he asked, all but whispering, eyeing the curtain, wondering if she lurked on the other side.

“Don’t know. She was gone by the time I looked for her. Course I was distracted by your … accident.”

“She just vanished?”

“Or ran away. Who is she? Or maybe I oughtta ask, what is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Gus frowned hard, his whole face puckering. “Now I know you’re lying, D.”

“Why would I lie?”

“I don’t know. But I know you know something. Because when that naked blonde popped in, you were scared, man. I saw it, dead fear all over your face, just before you ran for your life, straight into traffic. As lucky as that was for us, I still wanna know what’s so damned scary about her.”

Demetrius lowered his eyes. “I’m not lying to you, Gus. I don’t know. But you’re right, the sight of her scared the hell out of me.” Then he paused, frowned, looked up at Gus again. “What do you mean, it was lucky for us?”

Gus smiled, yellow teeth gleaming. “I’m not sure it was luck, exactly. You were doing all that visualizing, after all.” He nodded. “That fella who hit you? Drunk as a skunk. But even then, I knew who he was. Everyone knows who he is. Ned Nelson.”

Demetrius pursed his lips, shook his head.

“Owns what they call a media empire. TV stations, publishing companies, radio, God only knows what all. He’s so rich he gives billions to charity. I mean, we’re talking big money, D. Big money. Been rumors he wants to run for President next time around, and I guess they’re true, ’cause he was in a dead panic about being arrested for driving drunk and damn near killing a homeless guy. A dead panic. No one else saw it happen—and I don’t think that was just luck, either.” He shrugged. “So we made a deal.”

Demetrius blinked. “What kind of a deal?”

“I tell the cops I was driving him home, take the rap for driving without a license. They probably know better, but they also know him, so they’re not gonna buck it. And he’ll pay any fines laid on me, hire me a lawyer if needs be. Won’t be, though. You did run out in front of me, after all.”

Demetrius was sitting up in bed. “And in return?”

“He said we could have anything we wanted. So … I got us what we wanted. And enough shares of stock in his companies to keep it for a long, long time.”

“You got us … what we wanted?” Demetrius repeated, trying to process what Gus was saying.

“You remember, don’t you? What we were dreaming about when your trinkets started glowing? You remember. We’ve got it now, my friend. We’ve got all of it.”

2

Lilia walked with her two sisters along the path that meandered from Indira and Tomas’s fairy-tale cottage high on the craggy mountainside beyond the forest, down to Magdalena and Ryan’s reclaimed vineyard, Havenwood. The trees were just beginning to show tiny buds as late March went out like a lamb, morphing into April. It was warm, and the sun was beaming down from a blue sky. And though there was little vegetation, you could smell spring in the air.

Halfway along the path, they emerged onto a level spot with a waterfall out of a storybook splashing into a small rocky pond. Beyond the pond was a cliff, and far below, Cayuga Lake.

“The cave is behind the falls,” Indy said. “That’s where the Portal was. Still is, I guess.”

Magdalena stared at it but didn’t move any closer. Lilia saw the fear on her face. “You really want us to go in there?” she asked.

“We have to close it, Lena,” Lilia said. “We can’t leave a portal to the Underworld just hanging open.” They’d all agreed earlier that closing the Portal should be their first order of business on this, Lilia’s first day there, but now that they were facing it, Lena appeared to be having second thoughts.

“Come on, it’ll be fun.” Indy clapped her sister on the shoulder. “Our first spell together in three-thousand, five-hundred years. What’s not to like about that?”

Lena didn’t even crack a smile.

When they’d gotten home late the night before, it had been decided that Lilia would stay with Indy and Tomas at their cottage. Lena’s place, though larger, was already housing her and Ryan, along with Ellie and Lena’s mother, Selma. Bahru, the Hindu holy man Ryan had sort of inherited from his father, occupied the guest cottage but spent most of his time in the house. He’d become the world’s most unconventional nanny, Lena said. He was almost as attached to the baby as her parents were.

Indy cleared her throat, drawing Lilia’s attention back to the matter at hand. The Portal. “You have to dash through the edge of the waterfall to get into the cave,” Indy said. “We’ll get wet.”

“I remember.”

Indy frowned. “But you’ve never been here before.”

Lilia only smiled and cupped her cheek. “Big sister, I’ve been watching everything play out. You know that. You saw me.”

“In mirrors. In visions. And then at the end—”