That fucking liar.
What does that evil thing have to do with my mother’s prophecies? Was she warning me against it? Telling me to find and destroy it?
“We must do everything in our power to keep it away from her,” Dr. Devane says, placing a Tarot card on top of one of the pages. I can’t tell which card, but immediately, he begins another chant.
Let our thoughts be true, our messages clear
Both words and intent are recorded here
Leave nothing unwritten, no secrets to bear
Among brothers in blood, all things are shared.
“The book is the least of our worries right now,” Baz says. He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs into his hand. “When I pulled her out of the river, she wasn’t breathing. I had to give her mouth-to-mouth. When our lips touched, I… Guys, this whole thing is fucking bizarre as hell.”
“What happened?” Kirin demands, his arms crossed over his chest.
“I had a vision,” Baz says. “Well,hadisn’t the right word. More like, I was sucked into it.”
“What did you see?” Devane asks. His voice is tight with concern, though I can’t tell whether it’s for me, for Baz, or for himself.
“It was Stevie, but not,” Baz says. “I felt her calling to me. I followed the pull down a path through the forest. It was night time, and the moon was just a sliver. The stars were so bright, and I was staring up at them for a long time. By the time I looked down again, there was a lake, and Stevie was there. Totally naked in the shallow part of the water.” Baz takes a breath, shakes his head as if he still can’t believe what he saw. “She was kneeling on a rock, her other foot in the water. She had two urns, and she poured water from both of them—one onto the rocks, the other back into the lake.”
“Was there a circle of standing stones behind her?” Devane asks.
Baz nods, and for a moment, none of them speaks.
It sounds eerily similar to the vision Dr. Devane told me about in his class—the one I supposedly pulled him into.
“After she came to,” Baz continues, “she said some real weird shit. Seems she had a vision too.”
He tells them about my dream with Cernunnos.
“Holy shit,” Ani whispers.
Kirin shoves back his hood, revealing a shocked face. “How is this possible?”
“I knew it,” Ani says, and now he’s smiling. “I felt the connection. I fucking knew it!”
What the fuck is going on?
“No. I don’t buy it,” Kirin says. “She’s uninitiated, spent her entire life in isolation from magick… That kind of power wouldn’t just lie dormant. No. No way.”
“I’ve seen it too, Kirin,” Dr. Devane says, putting his hand on Kirin’s shoulder as if to offer comfort. “The first day I met her. We had an intense moment in the prison—not physical, the way Baz describes—but a connection nevertheless. I saw the same vision at the lake. I tried to convince myself it was coincidence, but it happened again in my class yesterday.”
“Dreamcasting,” Baz says.
“Yes, that was my first thought,” Dr. Devane says. “But now I don’t believe it’s as simple as all that. How can it be? If what you’re telling me is true, then she’s seen our true forms, Baz. My wolf spirit. Your horned god.”
True forms? Wolf spirit? Horned god?
There was a wolf in that ocean vision I had in Devane’s class. And after my dream at the river, Baz told me Cernunnos was the horned god of Celtic myth.
But what does that have to do with them? True forms?
Are they saying Devane is a freaking wolf, and Baz a god?
Baz is pacing now, his energy anxious. “That means the things we’re seeing… The lake, and the standing stones… She’s giving us a glimpse of her true spirit as well.”
