to get there, but I will.”
Keegan waited until midnight to cast the circle inside the deep dark of the woods. He wanted the power of the ending day, the new beginning of the next for what would be a long and complex ritual.
Reopening the portal on the other side would take less because of what he put into this. But, as his mother had asked, he would need to open it again not here, but in the west.
He’d need to be precise as well and so had to study his mark. Not just the country, not just the city, but her apartment. Like hitting the bull’s-eye in a target he saw only in his mind.
Then, shifting it all yet again, to move the opening miles west of where he stood now.
He’d considered going to Marg to have her help him with the ritual, as the shared blood between her and Breen would simplify the matter.
But in the end, he was responsible. And if his hard words on her leaving had added to her staying away, he would have to find softer ones—somewhere—to persuade her back again.
So he cast the circle, spread the light through the dark. He called on the gods to bless his efforts in the name of that light. He drank the wine, poured the rest in the goblet on the ground, and as the earth drank, he brought the fire. And with his words ringing in the night, he lifted it high, spread it wide. Slowly, painstakingly, he drew the air in, winding it while the strain of holding all contained and focused ran sweat down his back.
The fire burned hot and red, then blue, and at last white and brilliant as it compressed. As it formed the door between the worlds.
“And with the words I have spoken, I ask locks to break and door to open. Grant me passage this night with my oath to carry the light from world to world to keep them free. As I will, so mote it be.”
With faith, he stepped forward into the whirling light, the licks of flame. And hurled himself from one world to another.
A flash of light, a slap of heat, and the portal snapped shut again at his back.
He found himself in a room in dim light with noise humming against the window. But none inside, he thought, no sounds inside the room.
He flicked his fingers for light, studied it. Colorful, he thought, and tidy. And empty. The floor creaked under his boots as he moved toward a small table and saw to his right a kitchen.
He’d seen others like it on his journeys and in books, though this one was very small and smelled, not unpleasantly, of something pretending to be lemons.
He heard a door slam, and voices—but outside the one here.
So, an apartment then, but he couldn’t be sure, as yet, the right apartment.
He walked down a narrow hallway, glanced in the room on the left. He saw a bed, neatly made, more color, a guitar on a stand, pictures of people playing musical instruments on the wall.
It neither looked nor smelled like Breen, so he turned into the room on his right.
And there she was—or the scent of her, the feel of her.
The machine she used to write her stories stood on a desk along with the picture of her father, his, and the others, like the one she’d given Marg and his family.
A case on the floor held a few things as if she’d laid them inside or had yet to take them out.
But where was she?
“Bugger it.”
Because he recognized the scrying mirror, he picked it up. Under normal circumstances he’d never have used another’s magick tool without permission, but he couldn’t wait on the niceties.
“Show me.”
The glass darkened, then cleared.
He saw her, sitting at a bar. She held a glass of wine, and her lips moved as she spoke to someone he couldn’t see. He thought she looked a bit weepy, and that caused him some discomfort.
Then she embraced someone, another woman, one with white-blond hair falling over bare shoulders.
No, not another woman, he realized, looking closer as they drew away to speak again. A man dressed as one—and well.
Sally’s, he realized. She’d spoken of the place and the man often.
He set the mirror down to take a divining stone from his pocket. “Show me the way.”
He started out, then remembered his sword. This world, he knew, would frown on a man wearing a sword, so he unstrapped it, set it