Witches (45 page)

Rebecca came up behind him as new snow drifted down. “Neither will I,” she said softly. “In more ways than one. Neither will I.”

Chapter Eighteen

They were panting and staggering among the towering trees, the pond visible through the next line of bushes, and their stalkers were behind them on snorting, pawing horses closing the distance. Sebastien’s men had stopped shooting at them. Their horse was dead. Sebastien wanted them alive.

Amanda, sweaty and exhausted, not only from the running but from her earlier ordeal, was wheezing heavily as Joshua guided her. Her dress clung to her, a tangle of cloth that kept tripping her, while her hair had come undone from its neat braid long ago and was wild and flowing loose around her shoulders. Seeking Amadeus, her eyes kept searching around the silhouetted underbrush and past the hulking trees. She couldn’t accept that he wasn’t with her or following her. That he could be hurt somewhere behind them or, worse, dead. He’d been with her for all her life. It was like a part of her had died.

At least Maggie and Lizzy were safe with Joshua’s mother. No matter what happened to Joshua and her, his family would protect them. It was something.

Gradually filling the air around them there was this faint flickering glow. It lit up the woods like strong moonlight, but the moon was no longer in the sky.

What was it, then?

“Sweet Christ,” Joshua breathed in disbelief as they broke through the brush onto the bank of Black Pond.

Before them was a hovering entity of shimmering light covering the whole
pond like a dome. In
the center a spinning miasma of scenery that shouldn’t be
there. Couldn’t be there. A circle of winter complete with icy trees and eddying snow.

Poised on the bank, stooped in exhaustion, as they were, they could feel the freezing shaft of air piercing into the warmth around them. Touching them with icy fingers and sending goose bumps along their skin. Amanda shivered, crossing her arms across her breasts, even though the chill cooled her hot flesh.

“What in heaven’s name is it?” Joshua glared at the sphere of light as if it were the very mouth of hell.

Amanda’s eyes wide and startled, she stared at the vortex, too. Except she thought she knew what it was. The doorway into another time. Her time. Something exploded in her chest. A great yearning, a bursting joy. Home, she thought in wonder.

I can go home. Finally. Home.

It was winter there now, she’d almost forgotten.

She glanced across to Joshua’s illuminated face. The utter terror in his eyes slammed the truth at her like a brick wall.

Her earlier plan to take him with her back to her time was a pipe dream. Totally unacceptable. She’d never told him anything about her other self, Amanda, a witch from the twentieth-first century. A time where huge metal machines flew in the air, smaller metal beasts darted around on concrete highways and one could flick on light with one finger. A place where you could talk to someone clear around the world, and see strange faces talking strange tongues in a tiny illuminated box. Joshua would never be able to accept all those things. She’d never told him that she’d only taken Rachel’s place and wasn’t really Rachel at all. Never prepared him.

Now there wasn’t time. How to explain everything—and the doorway—to Joshua? It clearly horrified him. He’d believe her insane, at the least, or worse. Possessed of the Devil as everyone else thought she was.

“We have to get away from this...thing. I cannot even think of what to call it, much less understand it.” He had his arms around her shoulders, watching the light as if it could chase after them like some hungry animal, and he pulled her away from the pond.

“No!” Amanda protested, tearing out of his grip, and lurching toward the light like one entranced. “I should go. I don’t belong here.”

The voice came again, summoning her. It was Rebecca. She was sure of it. Somewhere through the doorway, in the snow, her sister was searching for her. Crying for her.

Amanda was torn. She felt as if she was lashed to three angry horses and they were galloping in opposite directions. Joshua and love on one end. The bloodthirsty witch hunter, Sebastien, his heinous followers, torture, death on another. Her time, Rebecca, Jessie, and her old life, on the last.

She was so distracted she didn’t hear or see the riders charging down on them. Joshua did.

He shoved her behind him, raised his musket, and shot the first man on horseback that reached them. A blur in the faint light.

Later Amanda could never recall what happened after that first shot. It was like a nightmare. The pack was upon them. Horses and men screaming, thrashing about, and colliding into each other in savage turmoil once they’d seen the doorway. It scared them so badly they retreated like beaten dogs.

As they did, they knocked Amanda to the ground, nearly falling into the water.

Sebastien ignored his men’s flight and bore down on her anyway, even as the others retreated in panic. “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!” he shouted. His eyes glittered diabolically as he aimed his gun and shot her point blank through the right shoulder.

Even through the blazing pain, Amanda was aware of the irony of the wound. Same place as last time. As if the two worlds, her two lives, were paralleling and now converging as the doorway loomed over her. She fought to remain conscious, rising to her knees. There was something she had to do.

Joshua had yanked Sebastien from his saddle and was pounding him with the butt of his gun, enraged. “Thou shall never hurt anyone I love ever again!” he cried out as he battered the man into a bloody pulp on the ground.

Sebastien wasn’t a demon, Amanda thought. Not yet.

Joshua stood over the still form in the dark, shaking. “Thou shall never accuse or imprison unjustly or torture another person, either. Never! Thou were the Devil’s spawn, Sebastien, not those poor bastards thee put in chains.
Thou.
And thou deserved to die.”

More shots and Joshua crumpled at her feet.

Amanda looked down at his body in the shadows and something went numb inside her. She crawled to him, hovered over him, took him into her arms as her shoulder bled, and rocked him like a baby.
I’ve been here before. I’ve lost you before, my love...not again...

Amanda’s scream echoed around the pond, a dying animal, a banshee’s wail.

“No, no, no!”

Blood trickled down her right arm and mingled with that of her dead lover’s.

Sebastien’s followers were running away. Leaving her.

Something that had come out of the light had frightened them that much.

Someone was standing above her. She felt a gentle hand on her trembling shoulder as she sobbed.

Amanda gazed up with dead eyes.

She looked up with Rachel’s eyes. Her face and hair, Rachel’s. It startled the other woman at first until she recognized her behind the disguise.

“Amanda, are you all right?” Rebecca asked her. Love and compassion in her large dark eyes.

“You called me Amanda? You know who I really am?”

“Of course I do. You’re my sister Amanda.”

Amanda’s vision cleared and in the bright light from the doorway, she finally saw the other woman. Really saw her. “Rebecca.” She was dressed, of all things, in a heavy winter coat, cap, gloves, and big boots. Silly woman. It was summer after all. Hot as blazes. Here, anyway.

“Rebecca!” She sobbed in genuine happiness, throwing herself into her sister’s waiting arms. “You’re here. You came for me. Risked your own life and soul for me.”

Rebecca, her eyes misty, too, nodded. She held her sister tighter. “Did you ever doubt that I would?”

Amanda didn’t answer; instead, she pulled away weakly and asked, “Did Jonny make it? Is he still alive?”

“Yes,” Rebecca hurriedly replied.

“Thank God!” Amanda gasped. “How did you get here?”

“I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, we have to get out of here. We have to go back.” She glanced over her shoulder at the constricting light. The doorway was smaller already.

“Right away. Or we could both be trapped here.” Her voice went down a notch. “If those rude friends of yours find their courage again, they’ll be back. Looked like a lynching party to me.”

“It was.”

Rebecca’s eyes fell on Joshua’s body. She recognized the grief in her sister’s bent form.

“Who is he?”

Amanda stared up at her with eyes shining full of tears. “It’s Jake, you know. Reincarnated. In this time he was known as Joshua.” Her words were a yearning sigh on the wind. Her shoulders shook and she swayed as if she was ready to collapse. Blood was dripping onto the ground.

“I loved him and he loved me and that damn Sebastien—that demon—is responsible for his death.”

“Jake reincarnated? Are you serious?” Rebecca sounded doubtful.

“Yes, I am. It’s Jake. I can’t leave him like this, Rebecca.”

“We can’t take the time to bury him, sister. I’m sorry. The doorway’s closing. We have to go
now.”
Rebecca tugged on her sister’s arm.

Amanda muffled a cry of pain, clutching at her wounded shoulder.

“You’re hurt, too!” her sister exclaimed, realizing it for the first time. “I can see the blood on your dress. You need medical attention.

“If we had time I think I know just the healing spell to fix you up. We don’t have time. The doorway’s dissolving quickly now.” Rebecca gazed back at it. As big as a car. Shrinking. In the distance the sound of horses’ hooves returning. Their leader, their god, was dead and they wanted revenge.

“They shot me. They shot poor Joshua.” Amanda rambled on inanely as she huddled down next to the body and cried softly. “What else do they want of me?”

“Amanda!” Rebecca suspected she was going into shock.

Amanda seemed to recover herself a little and kissed her dead lover’s lips one last time, then let her sister help her up from the ground. Let her half-carry her toward the ball of light with the snow scene dancing in the middle. Amanda’s eyes never leaving Joshua’s dead body lying in the grass.

They never made it. For manifesting itself between them and the doorway, was a blurry, shapeless form. For a moment, Rebecca was sure it was a huge man dressed in black with demonic gleaming eyes as crimson as fire, long dark hair, and a beard. A cloak blacker than night flowed around him like a living thing. His face, lit for only a heartbeat, full of sinister unearthly knowledge. Of sly avarice and cunning. Full of hell.

Satan.

Then his shape reworked itself, remolded and compacted into another form ...a dark haired woman in a dress similar to the one Amanda had on. Grave-white oval of a face with black holes for eyes. Her arms groped out toward them. Her mouth opened into an iniquitous snarl, showing teeth like ragged needles.

“It’s Rachel
,”
Amanda choked out, as Rebecca forcefully swung her wounded sister away from the ghostly grasping arms that tried to capture her.

“She wants you, Amanda; she wants your life, your soul,” Rebecca cried, feeling the apparition’s black magic writhing around them, a yawning hungry maw. “Fight her.”

“I can’t. I’m too weak.” Her body and her spirit. “I have no powers of my own anymore, I can’t fight.”

She yelled out as she was sucked from Rebecca’s arms and missiled through the air toward the ghost. The greatest cold she’d ever experienced enveloped her, a darkness closed in around her. Rachel was gathering her in like a tiny helpless animal caught in the jaws of a trap.

Rebecca watched helplessly as the dark caul of Rachel’s embrace encased her sister, and froze her like a lab specimen. Only her eyes, terrified and huge, seemed alive, begging for help as they touched her sister.

“No, you can’t have her, Rachel. Give her back!” A vehement demand from Rebecca. Her hands pounded against her thick coat.

Tibby, hiding all the while in her pocket, squealed with pain, yet never peeked out once. Probably thinking: Let the witches handle this. He was out of it. He didn’t do Devils.

The ghost laughed.

“I’ll fight you for her!”

Satan’s bride smiled jeeringly and began to dematerialize, taking Amanda with her. Amanda had no magic with which to stop her.

The power came as
before from nowhere—and everywhere. It rose up around Rebecca like a sentient being. A formidable presence. It crackled like heat lightning through her body and haloed her hands and fingertips.

Rebecca knew she could stop Rachel. She knew what to do.

The white magic jettisoned from her fingers in bolts of flashing lights and, a horde of angry bees, encircled the ghost, spinning round her.

The ground beneath the specter yawned open and swallowed her; tearing Amanda from the black witch’s arms, holding her safely aloft until the roiling, grinding earth fissure below her resealed with an ear shattering crack. Then something, an invisible set of hands, settled her down gently by the edge of the water on her back. She’d fainted.

“Way to go, Rebecca!” Tibby cheered from her pocket.

Rebecca ran to her sister, scooped her up as best she could in her arms, and staggered toward the diminishing portal. Not only was the circle of radiance almost gone, but Amanda’s deadly friends had returned, as Rebecca had predicted they would. They were charging at her even now on their horses, shooting and hollering at her.