Page 85 of A Winding Wave of Magic
To my surprise, he answered.Tell me where it is.
His desire split, less because he wanted it and more because he seemed…unable to articulate it. Speaking seemed to be difficult.
But he was very single-minded.
Tell me the Ssssecret.
He wanted…the box?
An overwhelming sense of eagerness pierced the veil, confirming that I was correct and that I had also just informed him of what it was he sought. The murmuring continued—it never stopped—and I immediately thought,no. This man could not, under any circumstances, get what he wanted. I braced against the unbelievable pressure, which continued to compress everything, including my thoughts, with a kind of pain that would not allow me to think of anything else.
I couldn’t have made him leave if I wanted. Because I couldn’t want. I couldn’t feel anything except the pain.
The first memory dripped out of my brain, searing like alcohol on an open wound. It really did feel like liquid, flowing down my shoulders into the couch. How did that work? But my ponderings were short-lived and then completely erased as the memories started to pour as if I were a wet rag that was being wrung out at last. They streamed over my body, moving through the veil and towards the floor.
At first, I didn’t even recognize them as mine. Early, fragmented encounters of my parents, of Gran, of the tiny discoveries a person makes during their first few years of life. The warmth of my mother’s skin. The chill of a watermelon rind. The ache of a new tooth. The feel of the earth under my feet.
A throb of irritation vibrated from the shadow. The compression doubled, and the memories poured faster, as though my mind were a faucet turned on high. Soon, memories of events I could consciously recollect started. Sybil’s face onmy fifth birthday. My first time swimming in the ocean. A smile from my father when I caught my first wave.
NO!Raw, slashing helplessness tore through what little of my being I was aware of. More of my early childhood flowed out of my face, down my body, and into the floorboards.Please!I implored wordlessly, not knowing exactly who or what was the object of my begging. But the memories continued to flow, and I watched as more of my childhood left me for good.
Then, somehow, the faucet stopped. The room expanded to its normal size with another loud clap of thunder.
The storm had picked up again.
The veil dropped, and I found I could move again. I jerked around, ready to fight my attacker, but stopped when I saw a truly enormous cat the color of black-flecked goldenrod hissing at an old man wearing a black trench coat and a fedora shadowed most of his face. What little I could see of the man’s features was creased and ragged, and his hands bore large liver spots of the very old. He was there, but he wasn’t, in and out of focus like a mirage in the desert.
A shriveled grape of a mouth opened to release a stream of incomprehensible words at the cat—the chatter from before, but unobscured by time and perhaps magic too.
The cat bolted around the room, knocking over tables and chairs, running up onto the counter, sending the hanging cast iron pans to the floor with a crash, cracking the tile. The old man continued to chant.
Small objects in the cat’s wake caught on fire and incinerated. Within a minute, the entire room was burning with bright orange flames, the smoke rising into my eyes.
The old man’s voice was shouting now, and the fire chased the cat into a corner of the kitchen. He finished his incantations with a phrase that sounded like, but wasn’t quite,Ipse corvus!
A large raven the color of midnight winged its way through the rising smoke. It flew out the front door and around the house to soar over the ocean, toward the lightning still flaring on the horizon.
“Cassandra!”
I turned, feeling the movement starting to return to my now aching bones. The cat now stood next to me. It stood about three feet from ground to shoulder, with tall ears that peaked into thin white strands of fur that were singed at the tips, matching the minor burns rendering its previously gorgeous coat patchy and desecrated. A bobcat, or maybe a lynx.
Did we have lynxes in Oregon?
A stupid question, considering that I was facing one: a deadly predator was two feet from my face and staring at me with large, dilated eyes the color of lichen.
“Cassandra,run!”
Was this cat talking to me? Had that terrible old man addled my brain’s function along with my memories? The cat nudged my leg with its head, but I could only shake mine.No, I can’t move,I tried to say, but my voice wouldn’t quite return either. At least it didn’t want to harm me.
The smoke was getting thicker, and I watched as the fire licked its way down the hall and around the rest of the living room. And yet, frozen in shock. I couldn’t move. I was going to die here. Just like my grandmother. Just like the shadow wanted.
“Cass!”
When I turned back to the cat, I found Jonathan crouched next to me, breathing heavily in burned, smoking clothes and rubbing his singed eyebrows.
He coughed. “We have to get out of here before this whole place burns to the ground.”
I coughed with him. It was painful, but more movement returned to my limbs. I dropped to my knees, feeling my way through the room that was still slightly blurry, whether from smoke or from the spell.
