Forged in Darkfire: An Amber Lee Novella (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 5) (6 page)

In what seemed like half a heartbeat, Damien was walking toward the fishing village. He couldn’t remember having gotten off the rock he had been sitting on, but he guessed he must have. The dizzying effects of this dreamlike world were starting to take their toll in the form of a pinching headache dully stabbing at his left temple, but it wasn’t enough to bother him much.

Careful not to touch anything or disturb anyone, he navigated his way through the tangle of boxes, tackle, and live flopping fish until he reached a ticket booth. There was a sign posted on top of the little wooden box, but he couldn’t read it. In fact, he barely even registered it. He just assumed one was there and somehow knew what the box was. Inside the booth there was a woman, aging and haggard, but still youthful in her own right.

It was the eyes.

She had Natalie’s deep brown pools.

These truths weren’t immediately apparent with his five senses, though. The woman looked nothing like Natalie, and yet somehow Damien felt a little bit of the witch in her. Much like in dreams where one person doesn’t look, talk, or act like the person they remind you of. You just know.

“How many?” she asked.

“One please,” Damien said.

“Where ya’ headed?”

“I… uh…”

“Alcatraz is nice this time of year.”

“Alcatraz?”

The old woman cocked an eyebrow, picked a cigarette from an ash tray Damien hadn’t seen until now, and took a long, hard drag. “Yes, Alcatraz. That place there.”

Damien looked, and there it was. The island prison looked somehow bigger than it was in real life. Or maybe he was just closer to it on this side of the bay. Or maybe the island had moved since the last time he had looked at it. Anything was possible here, he was starting to learn. Anything and everything.

Everything is symbols and metaphors,
Lily had told him.

Then it dawned on him.

Alcatraz is a prison. Something, or someone, is stopping Natalie from waking up. But that something or someone may need a metaphorical place to keep Natalie’s consciousness locked up, wouldn’t it? Magick had laws it had to follow, entities had conditions that governed their abilities, and this place had rules too. He didn’t know what they were, but they were there all the same.

So if an entity was keeping Natalie’s consciousness locked up inside her own mind, what better place than Alcatraz? A place she had grown up within line of sight of.
Fuck, of course! Of course!

“Fasho,” he said, “One ticket to Alcatraz.”

There was that word again; the same word Natalie had said to the waitress at the Bistro. It was another way of saying
yes
in the San Francisco bay. The surprise wasn’t that he remembered it, but that he said it like it came naturally to him.

“Good looks,” the woman said, and she grabbed a ticket and slid it through the window hole.

“How much?” Damien asked.

“Nothing for you, sweetheart. You’ve earned this one.”

His eyes narrowed, suspiciously. What if this was another trick? “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m just a friend of the West.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The West can hear you even from in here, Damien,” she said. “You have friends, child.”

With a nod she gestured over Damien’s shoulder. He spun around and saw the Captain of the fishing boat, smiling and waving him over. On the wind he could smell the brine and the salt and the fish, could hear the steady lapping of waves on wood and rock, the gulls calling from above, could see the magnificence of the ocean stretching out across the bay, beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and into forever.

All around him was the very presence of the Guardian of the West. It was there now, had always been there, and would always be there. A friend of the West; a friend of Damien’s.
This is why I’ve ended up here
, he thought. In a place as alien as the inside of Natalie’s mind he was safest close to the ocean, close to his element, and to his guardian. Magick wasn’t only a conscious art; the Currents were eternally pushing and pulling against each other. When a Witch reached into them to do Magick he could change them at his will, but when he wasn’t using Magick they would guide him along.

And Magick is what had brought him here.

He thanked the woman in the booth and made tracks across the dock toward the waiting boat. The Captain greeted him, helped him aboard, and escorted him to the prow of the ship.

“This is where you’ll be getting the best view,” he said, “The bay is a beautiful place.”

Damien nodded. “Thanks,” he said, “Really.”

“It’s no bother. I was heading there anyway.”

“You were?”

“Aye. I catch some of the best crabs around those rocks.”

He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he wasn’t about to argue with a dream-fisherman. Whether he truly was a piece of an almost Godlike being stuffed into a skin Damien’s mind could comprehend, or simply the figment of an unconscious woman’s mind—or both—it didn’t much matter. Damien was moving again, and moving was better than sitting on a rock and waiting. How much time had passed outside? An hour? Two? A day? Was the headache an indicator of how his body was doing without sustenance?

The Captain called for the dockhands to remove the ship’s moorings. All at once, three men approached the side of the fishing boat and untied huge, heavy ropes, freeing the ship from the dock. The engine grumbled to life, choking and gargling for a few moments before steadying into a whirr that started to gently propel the boat along the bay.

In moments, the ship was cutting across the water like a speedboat.

A strong gust, pregnant with the smell of the sea, was rushing by, tugging at Damien’s scarf and his coat and causing the American flag on the ship’s stern to snap wildly.

“I didn’t know this ship could go that fast!” he yelled at the captain.

From behind the main window to the cabin the Captain smiled a crooked smile. “I’m giving her all she’s got,” he said, “Just for you, lad. To get you where you need to go before the fire comes.”

The smile on Damien’s face faded away as if the sun had just slid behind a cloud. “Fire?” he asked. “What fire?”

The Captain started to speak, but Damien was having trouble hearing him over the gushing wind. He stepped away from the prow, crossed the deck, and went around the square cabin to find the door only to realize that there was none.

“Hey,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the window and screaming into the glass. “Don’t you have a door?”

The Captain shook his head. “Nope. Don’t need one.”

“What? How is that even possible?”

The old fisherman craned his neck around, smiled, and said “Because I am the ship, boy.”

His warm, old face didn’t seem threatening, but a strange dread was coming all the same; prowling toward him like a dark shadow just below the surface of the water. He spun around, searching for signs of a fire that could damage the ship he was on, but found none. And even if a fire had broken out on the deck of the ship, the fire-extinguisher clamped to the side of the cabin would have made short work of it.

He tapped on the window again and asked, for a second time, “What fire?”

“The demon’s breath, Damien,” said the old Captain, pointing, “The dark fire.”

When he turned around, he saw what the Captain was pointing at.

CHAPTER 7

It was a beast. To have given it another name wouldn’t have done justice to the
thing
approaching—no, advancing like an implacable tide—from across the other side of the bay. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, or maybe it had been there all along. There was no way to know in this dream world. But it was there now, mighty and terrifying.

Damien stared, wide-eyed and frozen, as the hulking mass of rolling black smoke tumbled over the Golden Gate Bridge and swallowed it whole. From within the cloud flashes of green could be seen, pulsing violently and erratically and making strange and terrifying shapes behind the cloud. A deep, grumbling roar followed its advance accompanied by the crackling of lightning whipping wildly in green arcs all about, striking the water and everything in its path like an angry child in the midst of a tantrum.

You couldn’t call it a force of nature. Nature doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t want. But this thing wanted, felt, and thought. Damien had seen it before; he had watched his own mother and father participate in its conjuring, witnessed the High Magus bring it forth into the world, and heard the cries of fear and pain from those it touched.

Some called it the demon’s breath, others insisted it was a demon made manifest, but most simply called it the Dark Fire; claiming that it was not the essence of one demon, but hundreds and thousands. He thought he would never have to see it again, never subject his mind to the maddening sight of it, and yet here it was; advancing like some terrible titan of myth.

And it was gaining on them.

“We need to go faster!” Damien said.

“This is as fast as she’ll go, boy,” said the Captain. “Unless you want to throw yourself overboard and give her a little less weight to pull, ey?” He cackled and went back to steering the ship as it flew toward Alcatraz.

Alcatraz.

There he would be safe. Those walls were designed to keep people in, but if he could only get there he was sure they would be able to keep
it
out. And Natalie would be there, he knew. Once he got to her he could wake her up and take her out. The Dark Fire wouldn’t be able to touch either of them once they were awake.

Damien rushed to the front of the ship and watched the world fly by. The storm was gaining. Fast. It had already consumed the bridge and half of San Francisco along with it by the time he looked back. Skyscrapers were starting to disappear now as fingers of smoke, black as pitch, wormed their way through the gaps and pulled them in to the cloud. When he turned to face the tiny island prison again he found it sitting where it had been a moment ago, directly ahead, but that was the problem.

It was still exactly where it had been a moment ago. Despite the wind in his hair, the spray of the water, and the grumble of the engines, the boat didn’t seem like it had closed any distance between it and the island in the last couple of seconds. In fact, it seemed like it was moving backwards!

“What’s happening?” Damien said to the Captain, shouting at the top of his lungs.

“We’re not going to make it, boy!” the captain said. “You’re going to have to jump.”

“Jump?”

“Aye. Jump if you want to get to the girl.”

Damien looked into the water at the head of the ship. It seemed still, somehow, but the distance between the ship and the prison was great and he wasn’t the best of swimmers. He was sure he could reach it. Sure he could. But the smoke would get to him first, wouldn’t it?

He rubbed the Amber in his hand with his finger and enjoyed the comforting warmth it gave him. When he closed his eyes he thought of Lily and remembered how happy they had both been that night when they escaped the Compound, when they put their old life in the rear-view.

Then a hand reached for his and clasped it tightly.

“Hi,” Lily said, smiling. She was on the ship with him now, and in that moment he couldn’t remember whether she had been on the ship with him all along or if she had just arrived, but it didn’t matter. A pure, raw happiness surged through him at the sight of his sister and he threw his arms around her.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. Emotions were coming now, like a well filling up almost to the point of spilling over. He didn’t know where they came from, only that they were there and they felt… urgent.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, “I’ve always been here. And I’ll always be here.”

Damien pulled away and smiled. When he looked over his shoulder, the Dark Fire seemed to have stopped moving. It was still there, clinging to the city and the bay, black smoke crackling with green light, but it was still; like a storm seen from a distance.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

“I do,” she said, “I wished so hard for you to never have to see that again. Lot of good that did us.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, it’s stopped.”

“Just like it did for us that night.”

“It’ll start again soon, won’t it?”

Lily nodded. “That’s why we have to go now.”

He craned his head around and found Alcatraz, now, rising up in front of the ship. Up ahead was a tiny wooden port, and the Captain was headed for it at a slow pace. It seemed like the port hadn’t been used in a long while, but there was another boat next to it; an inflatable RHIB much like the one Damien’s uncle used to take out to sea when he was a boy.

His heart caught in his throat. Lily’s hand tightened around his.

“It’s going to be okay,” Lily said, “Whatever this is, we can deal with it.”

“You don’t think he… he’s really responsible?”