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"My house is only a few minutes away. Let's go."
I grabbed my bag and followed the women outside, sliding into the backseat of a dilapidated green Honda that looked like the only thing holding it together was rust. I was surprised I hadn't heard the car pull up once I saw its condition, but when Lenore turned the engine it purred softly.
"Looks are deceiving," Lenore said with a wry smile, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. "Just like us."
I nodded, not knowing what to say. She was right. I would have never looked at these three women and thought they had the ability to save people's lives and destroy monsters lurking in the shadows. I prayed that they were powerful enough to help me.
Lenore's house was a short car ride away, as she had promised, and I was relieved when we pulled up to a normal-looking neighborhood. Lenore's house was bigger than my aunt's, but just as neat and tidy. A part of me had been afraid that she lived in some witch's shanty with potions bubbling in black cauldrons. Instead, it was a Tudor style house with black awnings.
Lenore directed me to sit on an elegant sofa in the living room once we entered her house. She went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. "Here. Drink this."
"Why? Will it help with the hypnosis?" I obligingly drank the water, draining the glass.
"No. I just thought you looked thirsty."
"Oh," I said, not s
ure how to take her eccentric response. I looked at the women standing before me, realizing I barely knew them. Yet I was putting all my trust in their hands. "So where do we do this?"
"We might as well do it here," Lenore said, indicating the living room.
"You mean, you don't have a secret room where you hold all your ceremonies?"
Marie smiled at my question. "We're just normal people like you, Caitlin. We don't fly around on broomsticks and we don't drink the blood of bats." She winked at me, obviously trying to relieve the tension. "Well, only when there's a full moon."
I gave her a weak smile, not wanting her to realize that her joke wasn't far from the truth of my thoughts of them.
"Quiet," Lenore admonished. She turned to me, looking serious. "I want to explain what's going to happen before we put you under. We'll link hands around you and pool our energies to help push you deep under hypnosis. But we need your energy too. A chant also helps. It funnels all our energy, pushing out other thoughts. We'll all chant 'Be as one', including you. Just imagine yourself sinking underwater. Deep underwater until there's nothing but darkness. If it works, you'll see flashes of images. They might make sense. They might not. Try to hold onto everything you see so that you remember the images when we pull you out."
The thought of imagining myself sinking underwater was frightening, reminding me of Simon's vision. At the same time, having to chant 'Be as one' made me want to grimace. It sounded too much like a stereotypical séance you would see in a horror movie. But what did I know?
The women stood around me in a circle, holding hands and looking down at me. Marie was frowning slightly while Cecelia nodded at me encouragingly. Lenore was expressionless as she directed me to close my eyes.
I started chanting with the women. "Be as one. Be as one. Be as one." The chanting continued and I couldn't help but feel a little foolish. I was trying to imagine myself sinking underwater, but I was acutely aware of the sofa under me and the bright lights that I could detect through my eyelids. I idly wondered why Lenore hadn't turned off the lights. It seemed like it would set the mood more.
I shook off my wandering thoughts, forcing myself to concentrate as I chanted. I thought of my aunt's last words to me, telling me to come to her. That we would fight the vardogers together. I thought of Sarah, of the countless hours she had spent consoling me after my visions. Her fierce protectiveness of me. And I thought of Simon. Of how it had felt to be in his embrace. Of his words of love. I felt myself slowly fading, the women's voices sounding fainter and fainter. I vaguely wondered if I was falling asleep when suddenly there was a rushing in my ears and I felt as if I was falling down an endless hole, a forceful wind surging against me, pushing me down until I felt I was going to suffocate.
Chapter Two
I opened my eyes, trying to escape the darkness but instead of seeing my aunt's friends standing above me, nothing changed. I closed my eyes and opened them again, willing myself to see something, but there was no discernible difference between my eyes being open or closed.
Panic started to rise as I tried to move but I felt bodiless. I willed my hand to move up in front of my face to see if I could make out its shape, but I felt no answering movement from my limb. In fact, it felt as if I had no limbs, as if I was just floating along, a soul with no body to call its own.
Fear wasn't the right word to describe what I was feeling. Fear sounded too human. Too concrete and definable. A blackness had entered me, a blackness so profound and deep that it swallowed me whole, from the inside out.
I was on the verge of giving myself into the blackness when I suddenly saw a shaft of light. It was shimmering, refracting onto itself like it was caught underwater, incandescent beams illuminating the murky depths. I strained my eyes, the only part of my body that seemed to be working. The only part of my body that seemed to exist. I tried to make out recognizable shapes before me, frustration mounting when all I could see was rays of flickering light.
Suddenly the rays of light moved with fast purpose, no longer meandering but pushing against the darkness with force. And they were aimed right towards me, funneling through the dark with a single-minded determination. I whimpered, although the sound reverberated through my mind instead of being audible. The lights hit me with a fury and everything exploded into color, figures and sounds moving through my mind with dizzying speed, faces contorting and bodies straining. I could hear voices, both familiar and foreign, warning me, guiding me, threatening me. It was a mind-numbing over-abundance of sensations and I struggled to hear everything, to retain everything. To understand everything.
Just as abruptly, the images became blurry, the sounds discordant and unintelligible. It was painful to experience and I felt claustrophobic. The sounds and images were flooding every part of my psyche, digging into every crevice of my mind like they were trying to overwrite what was already there.
It was easy to let go, to let the sensations overtake me. It didn't hurt if I didn't resist it. The feeling of slowly disappearing was pleasant, like I was being lulled into a gentle dream where I could finally rest.
There was a niggling thought in my head. I tried to push it away but it surged back to the forefront of my mind. Aunt Brenda hugging me the last time I saw her. Sarah's delight when she surprised me with a homemade dinner on my last birthday, despite the smoke that was billowing from the kitchen. And Simon. Simon's eyes when he told me he loved me.
I jerked forward mentally, wanting to clear my head from thoughts of rest. I tried to push up through the darkness, like a diver breaking up through the water after a deep plummet. I had to get back to the surface to help them. They needed me.
"Caitlin!"
