The Gathering Dark (32 page)

Father Jack frowned. “How do we do that?”

“Keomany knows a whole community of earthwitches ninety minutes from here on the highway. She thinks they can help.”

The priest nodded slowly and sipped his coffee. “I wish I could come with you.”

Octavian smiled. “I guess the Bishop’s not very happy with you at the moment. You or me, for that matter. Is he trying to find a way to blame me for all this?”

Father Jack started to deny it, but there was a glint in Peter’s eye that told him there was no benefit in lying. The mage had a long and nasty history with the church. No matter how much Jack himself knew things had changed—the Church of the Resurrection was hardly the secretive, self-serving institution that the Roman Catholic original had been—men like Bishop Gagnon made it hard to convince anyone of the difference. Particularly someone like Peter.

“It’s all right, Jack,” the mage said, dragging a hand across his stubbled chin, then reaching for his glass of orange juice. “You do what you have to do. It could be that you’ll learn what’s really going on, what that thing was in Wickham. I don’t think I have the power to take these places back one by one, but maybe with the earthwitches’ help, we can find the source. Let’s keep in touch.”

“Bishop Gagnon won’t like that,” Father Jack muttered.

Peter’s features narrowed, brows knitting together, and his nostrils flared. “I don’t think I care what he likes. Tell him he can take all the credit if I stop this thing, whatever it is, from spreading. And if it eats the world, well, he can just blame it on me. Not that there’ll be anyone left alive to listen.”

The priest smiled. He would have to rent a second car but that was simple enough. He held out a hand and Peter shook it.

“We’ll save the world in spite of itself,” he said, half in jest.

But only half.

Nikki lay sprawled sideways on the passenger seat of the Navigator. The big SUV’s engine rumbled and she could feel it all through her. Behind the wheel, Peter seemed to have retreated inward, lost in contemplation, but she had seen him like this before. The weight of the world. No one could expect him to bear the burden, to be responsible for stopping the cataclysm that was facing the Earth now, and yet Peter willingly took it onto himself.

She wanted to reach out to him, but she knew it was best to let him alone until he surfaced from wherever his mind had taken him.

Music played low on the radio and the sun was warm on her face. Her window was open partway, and despite the sun a light rain fell, a spring shower that sprinkled the windshield and sprayed a few drops in through the window. Nikki kept it down. The shower would be over in a moment and she never minded a little rain.

Keomany sat in the back, her fine features very drawn, her perfect black hair a curtain veiling her face. Nikki had seen horrors before, but she had never had to witness the ravaged corpses of her own parents. With what Keomany had seen and experienced, what had happened to her hometown, Nikki thought it was a wonder she was still speaking in complete sentences.

I’d be a basket case
, she thought as she peered over the back of her seat at her friend. What a strange turn of events, that this woman she had not seen in years would turn up at one of her performances to draw her back into the terrible, secret shadows of the world.

Only they aren’t shadows anymore, are they? Everyone can see them. Just turn on fucking CNN.

And that was the truth. Anyone in the world could turn on the television and watch the apocalypse in progress. The thought made Nikki shiver, but neither her lover nor her friend noticed.

“Not too far now,” Keomany said, craning forward slightly to peer at a sign above the highway. “It’s north of Brattleboro, this exit or the next. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You’re sure we shouldn’t have called first?” Nikki asked.

Keomany shook her head. “Cat and Tori will be there. In a situation like this, I can’t imagine them being anywhere else.”

Nikki sat up a little and looked at her, feeling a sadness sweep through her. This ought to have been a blissful moment, with Peter and Keomany around her and the sun and the breeze and the sprinkle of spring rain. Much as she wished, she could not sink down into the moment and pretend that beyond the confines of that vehicle, beyond the reaches of that highway, the world was not falling apart.

It was.

But at least she was facing the unknown with people she cared for, and who cared for her.

“So, Kem,” she began, peering into the back at her friend, “tell me about this whole earthwitch thing. I remember you had an interest in wicca way back when, but how did you get into this?”

Keomany sat back against the seat, pushing her hair away from her face. Her eyes were wide, as though she had just woken from a dream, and yet Nikki felt that what she had been pulled away from was the echo of the previous day’s horrors. She had not begun the conversation as some honorable effort to distract Keomany from sinking deeper into her grief, but if that was the result, so much the better.

“Wicca wasn’t for me,” Keomany said, glancing out the window at the forest to the east of the highway. “There’s a purity to it, sure, but there are also people who are just in it for the magick. Magick for magick’s sake is just bullshit.”

She blinked and glanced at the rearview mirror. “No offense, Peter.”

“None taken,” he said, surprising Nikki, who had thought he would have tuned them out. Peter glanced once into the rearview mirror. “The desire to know magick without a purpose—a benevolent purpose— always leads to dark places.”

“Exactly,” Keomany agreed, focusing on Nikki again. A sad smile teased the edges of her lips. “Wicca is benevolent, no doubt. But it had become popular, almost faddish, and that meant it drew too many people who weren’t benevolent. It was never about magick for me. It was about respecting this world that supports us, gives us life. We take it so for granted, and I didn’t want to live like that. The real power is in the earth and in the air. Nature is the soul of the earth. Gaea’s the mother of us all.”

With a small chuckle, she stopped and shook her head. “I’m preaching.”

“No,” Nikki protested. “I’m interested. Notice the lack of mocking?”

Keomany nodded. “All right. Anyway, when I learned about earthcraft—”

“Earthcraft?”

“That’s what it’s called. Simple and to the point, I think. It’s based on a lot of old Celtic rituals, ancient druidry, that sort of thing, and it’s meant to allow people to tap into nature, to honor Gaea and celebrate all that she provides us. It isn’t exactly an original concept, but it is benevolent. And the truth is, it works.”

Nikki nodded.
Obviously
it worked. They had all seen the proof of that in Wickham. “What I don’t understand is where the power comes from. And is it accessible to everyone? I mean, could anyone tap into the forces of nature like that? Sort of scary to contemplate.”

For a long moment Keomany just stared out the window, frowning. “I guess I never thought of it like that,” she said at length. “One of the tenets of earthcraft is that anyone can commune with Gaea like that, honor her, celebrate the festivals and all. The impression it gives is that anyone can tap into the power, but in practice I don’t think that’s true. Maybe two or three out of every hundred at the Bealtienne festival showed any actual power. Mostly to influence the weather, actually, and that’s an easy one for skeptics to brush off. Though it’s real enough. I was convinced pretty much immediately.

“Cat can create an earth tremor. She can make plants and trees grow. Tori can bring rain or snow or disperse clouds. They’re the major practitioners of earthcraft in the northeastern U.S.”

Nikki tried to wrap her mind around that. This network of people— mostly women—across the country, across the world, who had developed a new way of looking at the world and discovered magick in the midst of it. If they got together, they might have the power to change weather patterns in certain areas, to help crops grow, to feed people who were starving. If earthcraft grew, it could change the world.

If there was a world left to change.

“That’s amazing,” Nikki said. “Really. Are they as strong as you are?”

Keomany shrugged. “Up until what happened in Wickham, the day I came back from the festival, I’d enjoyed the ritual of it, the joy it brought me, but I’d never so much as summoned a raindrop, never mind made anything grow. I don’t understand it. Really I don’t.

“You asked where the power comes from. Well, it doesn’t. It’s here. It’s all around us. Earthwitches believe that we live in symbiosis with Gaea and that we can influence nature, turn it to our own ends as long as they’re pure. Some people are more adept at it than others. Maybe some people are just born with a greater . . . I don’t know, affinity, or whatever. I was happy to be one of the majority, someone who just wanted to be there. It felt right to me. I guess I had more of Gaea’s spirit in me than I knew.”

Nikki reached into the back seat and took Keomany’s hand. The two women gazed at each other for a moment and Nikki found herself regretting that she had let this friendship slip away and never once tried to resurrect it. Despite all that had happened, she was grateful for this chance to know Keomany again.

“I guess you do,” she said. “We were always in turmoil, weren’t we? Back when we met. But you’ve got a kind of peace inside you now, and I have to wonder if that comes from having connected with Gaea, or if there’s something in nature that sensed that peace, and found you.”

Keomany smiled so sweetly it nearly broke Nikki’s heart. Catastrophic tragedy had torn through her life in recent days, but somehow Keomany could still summon that smile.

“Let’s just hope that the coven will be able to—” Keomany began, but then her eyes narrowed and she cocked her head slightly, listening carefully to something.

A small laugh escaped her lips.

“What’s funny?” Nikki asked.

Keomany raised an eyebrow. “The radio. Listen to the radio.”

It was turned down low, a static buzz in the background, and Nikki had not been paying any attention to the music while they were talking. Now that Keomany had drawn attention to it, she mentally tuned into the music. Even Peter smiled, roused from his contemplation by the rhythm, and he reached out to turn up the volume.

It was her song. Nikki’s song. “Shock My World.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

The mood in the Navigator seemed to have been lightened by the music on the radio, at least for Peter and Keomany. For Nikki, it was another story entirely. Images flashed through her mind, memories of being in the studio recording the song, of singing it onstage at the showcase where Keomany had appeared out of nowhere, of Kyle, whom she had left behind with little by way of goodbyes and given scarcely a thought to since.

Auditoriums, bright lights, music charts. All the things she had hoped for, there at her fingertips.

Right now it all seemed so far away, and hearing that song on the radio, her own voice and guitar weaving in through the rhythm, made her feel as though she had been stolen away into some other world right along with Wickham and Hidalgo and Salzburg and the others.

Nikki through the Looking Glass.

She had chosen to stay. Given the current situation in the world and the quest that Peter and Keomany were on, she could not imagine any other option. The world beyond the Looking Glass would have to wait. Nikki only wished there was some way to know if she would ever get back to the other side.

Though he had remained silent throughout, Peter had listened very carefully to the conversation between Nikki and Keomany. He was fascinated by this thing Keomany called
earthcraft
, the magick it yielded being so completely different from sorcery. Whatever power Keomany was able to harness—or access—the fundamental concept was attuning oneself with nature, with the world. Sorcery was the renegade bastard of such thought. When Peter did magick, he forced the natural world to submit itself to him, subjugating to his will the very thing that earthwitches worshipped.

It made him uneasy to think about, but now wasn’t the time for a conversation on the subject. He figured the best thing for him to do at the moment was keep his mouth shut. They needed the help of Keomany’s coven, and his insights into the complex nature of magick weren’t going to help at all.

With Keomany directing him, Peter pulled off at an exit north of Brattleboro and they rolled west along a scenic, tree-lined street, passing a farm stand on the side of the road and a shop that sold homemade ice cream. There were a few antique stores and a gas station that looked as though it had been transported to the present day from somewhere around 1950. It was nice to see. Despite all that was happening in the world, this place, at least for the moment, was untouched.

A left on Orchard Hill Road took them on a winding, narrow drive through even more beautiful surroundings, low stone walls on either side of the street. When Keomany had said that the Bealtienne festival had been in Brattleboro, Peter had images in his mind of the thriving Vermont city he had visited once a decade and a half before. While it was hardly a metropolis, he had a difficult time imagining this huge gathering of worshippers—Witchstock, in a sense—in the middle of downtown Brattleboro.