Autumn’s house was quiet, but it was clear to the three women who sat on the floor around a candle that they weren’t completely alone. They had cast their circle and called to the spirit guides, hoping to make a good connection with Naomi.

Feeling a distinct sensation of being watched, Autumn slowly opened her eyes. The image of the blue dragon that hovered in the air above the flame was faint this time. In fact, she could see Leah’s solemn face right though it. But the dragon was there, nonetheless.

“Naomi! We’ve been trying so hard to reach you. We’ve had several seances lately with no success. I was beginning to worry about whether or not you were still there.” She hadn’t yet figured out exactly where ‘there’ was, but the spirit realm in which their friend now existed seemed to be one with a thick veil around it.

“I’m here,” Naomi said faintly, “but it takes a lot of energy to keep the door between the worlds open. And I’m not always alone.”

“Are you in danger?” Leah asked, her blue eyes desperate.

The dragon’s head rolled on her long neck. “Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?” Summer’s long blonde hair fell forward over her shoulders as she leaned toward the apparition. “Please, Naomi. We’ve been so worried about you.”

Naomi watched them, turning slowly to look at them each in turn. “I’ll be fine.”

And in an instant, she was gone.

Autumn, feeling the weight and pressure of their circle suddenly broken, lay back on the floor and spread her arms wide. “Do you think we’ll ever get to talk to her for more than a few minutes? I thought I had a decent technique down, but I’m starting to question myself.”

“Don’t go getting yourself a 9-to-5 job just yet,” Leah advised, rubbing her hands down her face. “It’s exhausting for all of us. I would have hoped that knowing her as we did would make this easier. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she’s in dragon form all the time in the spirit realm.”

“At least she seems to be.” Autumn had been thinking about this a lot ever since they had started their seances to try to reach Naomi. “I swear it’s like she isn’t either one at first, not until we call to her. It makes me wonder if there’s some other shape she can take, or if we’re just interpreting her as being a dragon because that’s how our minds understand her.”

“That’s an interesting proposition.” Summer, Autumn’s twin, bent over her stretched legs like a ballet dancer warming up for a show. “We only saw her transition into dragon form, what, once?”

Autumn nodded. “She was always so private about it.” The three of them had met Naomi back in college, back when they were still trying to figure out who they were and where they belonged in society. Leah was a psychic, and the twins were witches, which made it difficult to get along with their peers sometimes. Naomi had been a perfect addition to the group.

“For a long time, I wondered if she was telling us the truth about being a dragon,” Summer admitted. “Not that I ever thought she was doing it to be dishonest, but like that was just her excuse for not being the same as everyone else. Naomi was so quiet and reserved, like she was uncomfortable being on Earth, even.”

“And I guess we all understand that a lot more now.” Autumn had talked with her boyfriend about this quite a bit since they’d gotten together a few months ago. He, like the others, was a dragon shifter from Charok. Summer had paired up with Xander, and Leah had been the first one of them to discover that there were still dragons on Earth when she started dating Holden.

“Isn’t it ironic,” Leah mused, “that a dragon had been a part of our lives for several years, and then we all ended up with dragons? Naomi had said she was the only one, and I guess she would have been at that time since Holden and the others weren’t here yet. But I had never considered the possibility that more of them might come. Or that they might be so hot.” She grinned.

Autumn had to agree. “I just wish we could talk to her longer about where she is. I’d love to find a way to get her back. If she had come across the universe once already, then it doesn’t seem so unlikely that we might be able to free her from the spirit realm as well.”

The three women were silent for a moment, remembering, until Summer spoke. “I remember so clearly the day she died,” she said quietly, her wide eyes still trained on the candle flame even though they all knew the séance was over. “At that point, we knew for certain that she was a dragon, and it seemed so unreal that she could die from something like a car accident. That was the part that hit me the most, that even though none of us are just normal humans, we’re still very mortal.”

Autumn closed her eyes and was instantly transported to the hospital. She’d received a phone call, but that part had been blotted from her memory. Instead, what she recalled most was bursting into the emergency room, the smell of antiseptic whacking her in the face and trying to shove her back outside into the fresh air where she belonged. But she surged forward instead, trying to keep her voice steady as she asked the woman at the desk about her friend.

The surgeons were busy working on her, but even that hadn’t given Autumn hope. What was the anatomy and physiology of a dragon shifter like? Would the normal procedures and medications even work on her? Or would they be able to save her, only to have the government swoop in and keep her for experiments once they realized she was different?

In the end, none of that had mattered. Naomi had died on the table, and none of the doctors acted as though anything strange had happened.

“She was a good friend,” Autumn said with a sigh. “I feel like I’m being a bad one since I can’t bring her back.”

“Stop that.” Leah stood and crossed the room to a low table, pouring herself a glass of wine. “I want Naomi back just as much as you do, but I don’t think most people expect to be brought back from the dead. We’re doing what we can, and it’s not like we’ve given up yet.”

But the truth was that Autumn had considered it. She’d tried every spell she could think of, and nothing had worked. There was very little in her spell books that she hadn’t thoroughly examined and tested. Even if she did somehow manage to open a portal between their two worlds and drag Naomi back, what about her physical body? There were so many complications, and it didn’t give her much hope for the future.

“The truth is stranger than fiction.” Summer had muttered the words so quietly, Autumn wasn’t sure she had heard her correctly.

“What?”

Summer rose and followed Leah’s example, pouring herself a generous glass of Merlot before returning to her cushion on the floor. The candlelight danced in her golden hair as she took a slow sip and then tipped her head back. “I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. It’s not the kind of thing I normally like to do, and I’d be fine with not even owning a TV, but Xander really likes them. He says they tell him a lot about what it means to be human, because people take all the things they want from life and make them into movies.”

“Are you sure that’s your first glass?” Autumn challenged. “I thought we were talking about Naomi.”

Her sister gave her a sassy look. “It is, and we are. Just be patient for a minute. Xander’s big thing right now is scary movies. We have to wait until Nora is in bed, because we don’t want to scare her, and then we cuddle up on the couch. A lot of them are ones that I saw as a kid, but I notice so much more about them now than I ever did. And you should hear some of the questions Xander asks me! If he watched nothing but horror movies, he would think humans were complete idiots.”

“The point, Summer?” Autumn knew she shouldn’t be impatient with her, but she also knew that she had done more research on this than anyone else in the group had. If she didn’t know how to bring Naomi back, then she doubted anyone else would. And some dumb movie wasn’t going to help them, since they were living in the real world.

“The point is that I’ve seen numerous movies where someone gets sucked into a ghost world of some sort, and then they send someone in to retrieve them. It’s not about casting the right spell or anything, it’s more of a physical solution.” Her face was alight as she explained, as though she had just come up with a Nobel Prize-worthy theory.

“It’s a friggin’ movie, Summer, not real life. The people who write those movies have no idea what magic is really like.” And it was for that exact reason Autumn didn’t usually bother watching movies like that. She didn’t mind a romantic comedy or even a drama, but it annoyed her to no end when people pretended to know something about magic.

Her sister sighed. “I know they don’t. Or at least, as far as we know they don’t. But there might be some logic to the scenario.”

“Right now, the only thing we’re able to do is open up a window for us to look through and talk to Naomi. That’s it. There’s nothing like a room for a person,” Autumn argued.

“It’s an interesting theory, though,” Leah volunteered. “And it might not be exactly what we’re looking for, but I think it’s worth exploring. I was hoping we could get at least enough of a connection that I could establish a psychic link with her. Maybe that way, I could get a good understanding of exactly what’s going on with her. But so far, that hasn’t worked. We’ve got to keep our minds open to any option.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Autumn followed suit with the others and poured her own drink. It was a good wine, one that Leah had picked up on the way over. She never went cheap on things now that her psychic business and her books were doing so well. “I’m just so frustrated because I’ve spent a lot of time on this. I consider it my goal in life at this point, and I haven’t made any progress.”

“It’s a process of elimination, at least,” Summer offered. “I wonder if maybe the guys can help us.”

This was something that had occurred to Autumn already, especially when Julian had asked to borrow some spell books from her. “I wish I could say that they can, but I don’t think it’s possible. Julian likes to study spell books, and even did when he still lived on Charok. But it’s more of a scholarly knowledge than applied. Even he doesn’t know much about the spell that brought them to Earth. It happened so quickly, and he’s spent months trying to figure out how to replicate it, but to no avail.”

“Surely that’s different from what we’re talking about,” Leah mused. “In some way, at least. It’s probably still worth talking to him about it.”

“I’ll do that next time I see him.”

When the other women had gone home and it was time for Autumn to go back to the place she shared with Beau, she hesitated. This house was now completely dedicated to her spiritual needs. She had Beau and Elliot at her new home, and she was able to dedicate this space to meditation, storing herbs, and working new spells. She and the other women had a private, sacred place for seances and spellwork. It was a wonderful sort of freedom, and Beau never demanded that she be home early or stop what she was doing simply because he wanted to be with her. He respected that she needed her privacy and her alone time, especially when it came to focusing in on what she truly was: a witch. But all the space and time and materials in the world didn’t seem to be enough to bring Naomi back.

She couldn’t help but feel that there was something she was missing, something she should have seen a long time ago. She reached out to Naomi in her mind, knowing that she couldn’t possibly even say hello without the help of the others, but determined to do it anyway. There was nothing there for her. With a sigh, Autumn picked the cushions up off the floor, grabbed her purse and locked the door on the way out.