The room was close and fragrant, thick with the scent of sandalwood and something older—earthier—beneath. Candlelight trembled over the practitioner’s lined hands as she gestured for me to sit. I sank into the velvet-backed chair, feeling its age, the way the wood creaked and sighed. The walls were heavy with drapes, patterns interlacing on patterns, dark colors swallowing the last of the day through heavy curtains.
She settled opposite me, a slender silver bell resting between us. Her eyes, deep-set and luminous, never left mine. "Ready?" she asked, but it was not a question. It was an invocation.
I nodded. My pulse thudded in my ears—a mixture of dread and longing. She closed her eyes and began to chant, her words old and low, not quite English, not quite French. The sound crawled up my spine and burrowed into my chest. I breathed in, slow and deep, as she instructed, fingers gripping the arms of the chair. The world seemed to narrow, the edges blurring. The flame of the candle grew brighter, then impossibly bright, until it was the only thing I could see.
A pressure built behind my eyes, like a storm about to break. Then, nothing. Weightlessness. A slow, tumbling drift into darkness. Voices echoed faintly—Marie’s laughter, Crowley’s imperious command—then faded. Images flickered: a brass key, a mask painted with ash, the swirl of a blue silk skirt. I reached for them, but they slipped away.
"Let go," the practitioner whispered as if from the end of a long tunnel, her voice suddenly impossibly far away. "We are going back."
The darkness shifted. Suddenly I was standing—not sitting—on worn cobblestones slick with rain. Gaslight flickered above, throwing distorted shadows along an alleyway. The air was thick with the smell of the Mississippi, dark water and river mud and a tang of iron. I looked down: not at my familiar hands, but at stranger’s fingers, callused and strong, a ring heavy on the right hand, set with a stone I did not recognize. My heart beat faster. The sensation was so real it bordered on overwhelming.
Somewhere nearby, music throbbed—a drumbeat, low and urgent. I could not tell if I was meant to follow it or flee from it. I pressed my palm to the cold stone wall, grounding myself, listening. Above the rooftops, thunder rolled, distant but approaching.
A figure emerged from the shadows at the mouth of the alley. A woman in a blue skirt, her eyes gleaming in the lamplight, her mouth set in an unreadable smile. She raised her chin, as if she recognized me.
"You are late," she said, her accent curling around the edges of her words, warm as summer. "They are waiting."
The drums picked up, urgent now. The world seemed to bend and narrow around her—a moment poised on the edge of something vast and unknown.
I took a step forward, unsure whose will was guiding my movements, feeling the past and present collide within me. The alley behind me was empty now; there was no way but forward, deeper into night, into memory, into her gaze.
The woman’s smile widened. "Will you come willingly, or must I call the others?" She lifted her hand, and something shimmered at her wrist—a charm, a sigil, a sign. The air itself seemed to hum, charged with possibility.
Suddenly, a shadow flickered behind her—a second presence, tall and severe, watching, waiting. The air between us thrummed. The choice pressed against my skin: to move, to speak, to trust—or to resist and risk whatever waited in the darkness beyond.