She stood beside her mate in a circle of seven. Their combined energies shone like a supernova. Dread darkened the group’s colors. Their leader’s grief and outrage was a smear of gray and black. The change in her mate was that of a warrior rousing from sleep. She felt her own energy resonate to his, ringing like strained crystal.
He has escaped and left our world. We have to stop him.
The circle said good-bye to their home. With power and arcane fire, their leader prepared a potion from which they drank to transform and travel to a strange world.
Her mate confronted his final moments with strength and courage. As his beautiful eyes closed, he vowed, I will see you soon.
They had fit together with such perfection. They had been born at the same moment and had journeyed together through life, contrast and confluence, two interlocking pieces that sustained and balanced each other. But no matter how connected they were in life, they each had to cross that midnight bridge on their own. Her energy bled ribbons of bright red as she faced the final moments of the only life she had known.
She tried to reply but the poison had already disconnected her from her physical body. She sent him one last shining pulse of love and faith as darkness descended.
She had died such a long time ago.
Thousands of years ago.
Wait. No.
Mary flung out a hand and cracked her knuckles against something hard. Pain shot up her arm.
She surged upright. Shards of color surrounded her, like fractured pieces from the ruins of a chapel’s stained-glass window. After several uncomprehending moments, she realized where she was. She was sprawled on her bed in a chaotic nest of comforter, pillows, clothes and scraps of material.
She wobbled where she sat. Her heart erupted into a congo drum medley then slowed to a more normal tempo. Her head, not so much. It pulsed with a steady throb of pain.
The bedside clock read six thirty A.M. For Christ’s sake. She’d only gotten home five hours ago. Her ER shift had been twenty-six hours long. It had involved a five-car accident and two gunshot victims, one of whom, a seventeen-year-old single mother, had died.
Some people played golf in their downtime, or went hiking or took aerobic classes. She dreamed of glowing, rainbow-pulsing creatures that drank poison Kool-Aid in some kind of bizarre suicide pact. Was that better or worse than dreaming of the gunshot victims?
She thought of the dream-criminal the creatures had pursued. Sweat broke out as dread, mingled with a sense of unspeakable loss, ricocheted through her body with the intensity of a menopausal hot flash.
She sucked air into constricted lungs. Maybe she shouldn’t try to answer that question right now.
Something stuck to her face. Her fingers quested across her skin. She pulled a scrap of cloth from her cheek and stared at it. The cloth had a blue-and-green paisley design. A blurred memory surfaced, like the smear of color atop an oily roadside puddle. She had found the cloth a couple of days ago in a clearance bin at the fabric store, and she was planning to incorporate it into the pattern of her next quilt. She had been wound up from her overlong work shift when she had gotten home, so she had released some of the nervous energy by doing household chores. She had fallen asleep in the middle of folding laundry.
Adrenaline had destroyed any chance at getting back to sleep. She dragged herself off the rumpled bed and yanked at her wrinkled T-shirt and shorts. She attempted to finger-comb her hair, which crackled with electricity as she coaxed her fingers into blind alleys and dead ends. The shoulder-length tawny strands hinted at a mixed-race ancestry and were so thick and wavy they were layered by necessity. At present her hair seemed to have more energy than she did. She gave up trying to untangle the mess. It sprawled across her shoulders unconquered, a wild lion’s mane.
Mary scooped up her house keys and sunglasses from the hall table, slipped on tennis shoes and grabbed a hooded sweatshirt. She was outside in the early warm spring morning in less than a minute. Bright sunshine stabbed at her before she slipped on her sunglasses.