Chapter Twenty-four
“Damn it.” Katrielle lost the image before her. Its solidness faded, wavered, and was gone. She no longer felt any ground beneath her feet, no longer heard sound, no longer felt much of anything solid or tangible at all. It happened so fast.
She’d been so close. But William Solan wasn’t ready to be found. And just as she’d thought her door was about to open, she’d been sent away again. Now she was lost, trapped in the nowhere essence of that space between spaces, the time between the seconds. She flew through the glue of the multiverse, the sensation not unlike being a dried leaf caught in a violent wind. She was tossed about, sent from the wall of one dimension to the next, and her spirit was being dissolved along the way.
In this strange miasma of nothing, she felt her mind slipping away. Without time and place to anchor them, her thoughts were becoming less real. She was becoming less real.
This was the danger of such a spell. This was the risk of taking on the Time King. She’d known it going in, and now she realized that her fear was coming to fruition. The irony of it was that she barely cared, because her mind was barely there.
Lalura.
Katrielle heard the name distantly, and just as distantly she recognized it.
Miss Chantelle!
Katrielle would have frowned, her brow would have furrowed, had she possessed a brow to furrow. But she was disconnected and immaterial and had no face to frown with.
She’s Katrielle now, remember?
Oh, right.
Can you reach her?
Almost… Katrielle! Take my hand!
Kat looked around, thinking that it was odd that she at last had a head to turn in this murky nothing, and when she did, she saw something solid, something more secure and real than everything else around her. It was a wall, not unlike the opalescent wall of a soap bubble, and in that wall was a hole. A woman’s upper body appeared in that hole, blurry but again more substantial than everything else.
Vaguely, Kat recognized the woman. I know you. She had light brown hair streaked with highlights of ash that looked as though ice had made its way down the tendrils. That same ice was reflected in her very light blue gaze, intense and powerful.
Katrielle, take my hand! Trust me! the woman pleaded. Her lips moved out of time with the words, as if she were a video being streamed a little too slowly for the viewer. But Kat now felt her entire solid body beneath her head, and she hadn’t before. She was becoming more real herself as she looked down at this woman.
Down, she thought. I’m floating above her. I am tangible. I am real.
“Take my hand!” the woman cried desperately.
This time the words matched up with her lips, and Kat heard them more clearly than before. She maneuvered downward, willing herself to float through the dangerous nothing between worlds.
“That’s it! You’re almost here!” The woman leaned outward, and now Katrielle could see that she was being held in place by two other pairs of hands. Kat recognized the women holding her too. Names began to materialize in her mind, names that matched the jet black hair and green eyes on one of them, and the gold-blond braid on the other that was so very thick and beautiful, it was inhuman. She was inhuman.
She’s fae, Katrielle thought. Her name is Violet. The dark haired woman is her sister, Dahlia.
She looked at the leaning woman again, at the ice blue in her arctic eyes. And this is Poppy Nix. The Winter Queen. They are my students. My warlocks.
My friends.
And in that moment, she grasped Poppy’s hands, taking hold of her wrists with every ounce of her strength. Poppy squeezed back and shouted, “I’ve got her! Get us back inside and close the breach!”
Katrielle felt the last pieces of herself coalesce with finality, and her magic kicked in like a shockwave. She engaged it at once, shoving both her and Poppy back inside the breach the warlocks had created. Her body yanked forward, and she and Poppy collided, rolling end over end onto a sidewalk. A wave of her hand and a hard burst of her power shut the rift behind them with the sound of thunder.
When the thunder passed, Katrielle found herself sitting up, surrounded by her warlock students. The four of them knelt or sat on the whitewashed cement of a sidewalk lining a clean downtown street. Several hundred yards away, a gazebo with a fresh coat of white paint gleamed beneath an early afternoon sun. Children played in the adjoining park, and across the street, a soda fountain advertised Egg Creams and Black Cows.
A nearby barber shop storefront featured the traditional candy cane striped pole. All that was missing was the early twentieth century music.
She turned to Poppy, and then addressed both Violet and Dahlia as well. “Where are we?” she asked. But she had a feeling she knew already. This was one of the worlds William had created. Her spell hadn’t managed to help her get into William’s personal world, but it had helped her get into one of theirs.
“We’re in some sort of alternate dimension,” said Violet. “Poppy and Dahlia managed to find their way into it with me.”
“This must be your idea of a perfect world,” said Katrielle. “Solan created one for each of you. I guess he made this one for you, Violet.”
“It’s not hers,” came a fifth voice.
Katrielle turned around fully on her rump and looked up to find Evelynne D’Angelo standing over her.
“It’s mine,” said Evie, smiling. The Vampire Queen’s long brown hair framed her face in a gentle breeze, and her brown eyes were luminous. She shrugged self-consciously. “You know that scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly goes back in time and “Mr. Sandman” is playing, and everything is clean and happy and the sun is shining bright?” She shook her head as she looked around at the picture-perfect town. “I must have watched that scene a hundred times. Maybe two hundred.”
Katrielle considered her and the town square, and everything made sense. “There’s no pain here,” she said. There had always been pain, but the square was pretend, made up by Hollywood, and it had been done so specifically to give the impression of something “better.”
“There are no family obligations, no illnesses, there’s no abuse and no war,” Kat continued. “And the sun is shining.” She smiled. “Something I imagine you miss these days.”
Vampires were the offspring of Akyri and warlocks, and as such they were born with inherent magical power, and most of them learned how to cast protection spells or charms from the sun before they could walk across the room on two feet. However, Evie hadn’t been born to an Akyri and a warlock. She had been changed into a vampire by the Vampire King. She was a seer by nature, and hence magic still ran through her system. But not warlock magic. Not dark magic.
Katrielle had never considered it before, but she could now imagine how taxing it must have been for Evie to have to learn warlock magic in order to protect herself from something that ruled and reigned every single day on the planet. Something as prevalent and merciless as the star at the center of their solar system.
She could also imagine that if Evie grew weary of it, grew tired, she would not ask for help. She was proud. It was a fault and a blessing. It forced her to work hard. She’d helped support her family with her book earnings for years. She always aided where she could, volunteering at shelters and facilities when she had time. She wasn’t the kind to admit weakness.
So here in this world where the sun shone and Evie walked beneath it without fear, her perfect world allowed her the rest she probably secretly craved.
William had obviously seen she’d needed that when no one else had. Katrielle perhaps knew him better than anyone, and she’d still underestimated him.
She turned to Poppy and asked, “How did you get here?”
Poppy shrugged. “I had help. I knew something was off. Everything was just too good. It was all too happy.” She laughed. “In my world, it was springtime and I had no allergies and I wasn’t having heat-induced migraines. Not that I’ve had them since I joined Kris, but… I didn’t remember I was queen either. I just felt peaceful.”
Kat’s brow rose. “And… that was a bad thing?” she asked, chuckling.
Poppy shrugged. “I’ve never trusted perfect things. They’re like a fresh coat of snow covering something ugly underneath. Even a prison or a slaughterhouse looks like a wonderland on the right winter day.”
“So she started casting a spell,” said Violet, who was also smiling. “And since in my world, I was becoming just as suspicious, I happened to be doing the same thing at the same time. I was casting a spell that showed me what was real from fantasy.”
Kat nodded. “The darkened mirror spell.”
They all nodded right along with her.
“I was casting it too,” said Dahlia with a wry smile. “In my world, women were the rulers of every country on the planet. If anything will set off a buzzer that things are just too good to be true, that’ll do it.”
They helped Katrielle up, and the redheaded Nomad looked from one of them to the other. “But you didn’t tell me how you ended up in Evie’s world.”
Dahlia shook her head. “For some reason, we were all casting the exact same spell at the exact same time. The timing of the magic caused rifts. Some of us were sucked through those rifts into the same nothingness we found you in. Fortunately, Evie managed to hang on to her world long enough to pull us in.”
Kat glanced at the Vampire Queen. Evelynne D’Angelo had been the first Queen. Something in that gave her more strength in times of crisis, and that strength had been there when she’d needed it most.
“So how did you find me?” Kat asked next.
Violet grinned. “Your magic is stronger than ours, Miss Chantelle. We heard you knocking and opened the door.”
Kat laughed. Violet had always called her Miss Chantelle. She was having trouble switching from Lalura to Katrielle, and right now that didn’t bother Kat at all. She found it endearing in fact, and was just glad the girls had kept their heads and remembered their magic well enough to pull her out of the nothing – before she became nothing herself.
Kat sighed. “So here we are.” She looked around again at the picturesque image, the children playing, a dog catching a Frisbee, classic cars driving by.
“Where do you think the others are?” Violet asked.
Eight Queens were still missing. Kat knew where they were.
“No doubt still trapped in their own worlds,” said Evie. “You said Solan created these?”
Kat nodded. “He is trying to protect you from the Triad.”
“The Triad?” they all asked as one.
“It’s what your husbands are calling Amunet, Ahriman, and Arach. Of course, a few of the boys have surreptitiously named them ‘The A Team.’”
There were some chuckles. Then Evie, who hadn’t laughed, asked, “Are the Nomads back? Reborn already?”
Katrielle shook her head. “I don’t know. They weren’t that I knew of at the time I cast my spell.” She looked around again, glancing at the sun above them. “But time will no doubt move differently in here than it does out there. So since then? I have no idea what has occurred. I’ll say one thing for sure though.” She took a deep breath and let it out heavily. “He’s done what he set out to do. William has kept you all safe. I couldn’t have gotten in if you hadn’t opened the door. That means other Nomads won’t be able to either.”
“I can’t imagine how much power it takes to create twelve worlds like this completely untouchable by Amunet and her ilk,” said Poppy gravely.
“Indeed,” agreed Katrielle. “The Time King has surprised us all.”