Echoes of Initiation
The fall is endless—cold, stinging, silent. It always is.
When I land, it’s with a soft thud. My knees hit the ground like water giving into stone, and I sink immediately. I brace myself with the heels of my hands. The room spins around me as my breath comes shallow and fast. The pearl necklace tangles in my fingers, its faint pulsing like the dying flicker of an ember. It drains me every time.
I stagger to my feet, but my shaking knees barely support me. I fall again. It always amazes me how exhausted I am, but I guess that’s to be expected when you use your own life force to power a time portal mechanism created by the most powerful priests in several millennia. I’m glad Spencer is one of them.
Legs aching, I rise again slowly. It takes everything I have just to stand upright. Somehow, my muscles obey. Forcing trembling hands, I slip the necklace over my head. The weight of it on the back of my neck is oddly comforting.
I made it. I’m here.
Spencer remembers me dying as an old woman in his arms. Which means I live through this—right?
I hold onto that thought like a lifeline, but doubt creeps in. What if I fail? What if I never even meet the God?
Worse, what if the God teaches me the meaning of the verb smite?
I’m willing to believe Spencer remembers my long life accurately, but not willing to trust that Veronica will be just fine unless I can personally keep her safe from every imaginable danger. Nothing against his memory, but my maternal urge is stronger than my faith in him.
Am I crazy to travel to the past? What if I change something, something that changes Spencer?
I shake off the shudder that jolts through my entire body. I’d been so focused on my own need for security that I hadn’t thought once that I might alter my timeline somehow. I’ll have to be super careful.
I’m trying to do what no one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully achieved. Plus, I’m trying to do it when I’m physically drained from time travel, something that can take me hours to recover from fully. There are far more powerful priests and priestesses than I’ll ever be who haven’t done anything this dangerous. Ones who’ve reincarnated many times across the ages, yet here I am, the weakling of the priesthood, even weaker now, ready to confront one of the most powerful beings in the holy books of at least four religions. I clasp my necklace to keep my hands from shaking.
Yet, this is the moment I’d intended, and it was my intention—the secret of all successful manifestations—combined with my life force that brought me here. I’m positive I won’t run into my younger self. In this time, perhaps, but not in this building. My younger self won’t come here alone ever again.
The hallway ahead yawns as though stretching into a dream—or a memory. The pale, yellow-painted cinderblock walls and polished white linoleum floors glow under the glare of harsh fluorescent lights in bare pairs overhead. Everything about the boys’ dormitory is modern for the 1970s: clinical, boxy, minimal. A step above a prison but just barely.
This is the Daeganean high school Lady Moira founded, its purpose hidden behind a mask of charitable education. This, here, is where students like Spencer train to be priests—but in this moment of time, he was secretly initiated into the priesthood only hours ago.
The secret won’t stay one for long. By the time the truth comes to light, though, a far heavier burden will have settled over Spencer: the gift of knowing. And with it, he’ll remember the lifetime ahead of him, see Siobhan’s plans for him unfold. Her ambitions. Her reckless defiance of fate.
In a cold sweat, I shiver.
The memory of her betrayal had haunted me then. It still echoes now, half a mile away where my younger self is just beginning to understand that her friend isn’t her friend. My younger self is still at Lady Moira’s mansion, sneaking astrology charts for Siobhan and acting as lookout when she needs to plot. She’s hiding from her shame even now, wracked by tears at what she’s witnessed and that Siobhan made her a part of it.
Not yet the wiser. That will come when Lady Moira discards my dreams in nine months to protect Siobhan.
I shake off the thought and step forward. No doors open. No voices call out. Everything is deathly quiet except for the buzz of a failing fluorescent bulb and the crackling wards I’ve shattered on my way through. The house mother’s suite looms in its usual place halfway down the corridor. The wooden plaque with ornate cursive letters catches my gaze. I pause just briefly, my fingers brushing against the names of priesthood candidates. Names long-dead in the future where I left Spencer, each name burned in delicate script into the wood with a soldering tool. All so young and full of ambition.
My fingertip catches on the raw edge of an etched W. His name.
Spencer von Windlach.
My throat tightens. A flood of memories blindsides me when my hand withdraws. Lady Moira’s warnings. Siobhan’s shrieks of pleasure from inside her room while I stood watch. The frantic hum of chanting. Spencer screaming as his bind rune of initiation burned into his flesh.
And me—hiding in the shadows, staring into his panic-stricken eyes as he burst from her room, not seeing me or anything else in his drunken path.
“Siobhan, what the hell have you done?”
His words still feel louder than they were. Louder than they had to be. That fractured cry was the first flicker of the knowing as the truth slithered into him.
Truth, yes, that Siobhan’s schemes had carved out a life for him riddled with exile and time loops. Of lifetimes away from the only thing he’d ever wanted to protect. All for her visions of power.
A rustle from behind the house mother’s door cuts through my thoughts. I freeze.
It stills.
I move on. If I’m caught, I won’t stop. I’m not afraid of the house mother—not when I know I look enough like the young Maeve of this time to pass for her, though thinner now. I’ve been here before with Siobhan, many times, but no one thinks twice about me. In their eyes, I’m not pretty enough for even one of a dozen teenage boys to notice.
Spencer’s door stands at the far end of the corridor, half-shrouded in shadow beneath a buzzing, flickering fluorescent light that threatens to die. The brass 7 bolted onto the frame gleams like a misplaced artifact. I smooth my palm over the wood, holding my breath. It feels too cool—too quiet.
I push gently, and it creaks open.
Inside, darkness greets me, except for the faint, molten glow of a lava lamp gurgling beside a narrow bed with a built-in bookcase for a headboard. Shadows stretch along the walls, pulsing faintly with the loops of red wax swirling in liquid. Beneath the thin green bedspread, something shifts.
Spencer. God, he’s impossibly young.
It strikes me how unfinished he looks, barely out of boyhood. Damp blond curls tumble against his face, which lies tilted toward the pillow, slack jawed. A small wet blot darkens a corner beneath his lip. He’s still draped in ceremonial black, smelling of ritual incense and spilled mead. And—and her. And sex. The smell dances on the edge of nausea.
His right arm lies stretched above his head, half-curled at the pillow. Across his right wrist, the raw bind rune of initiation glints red. The permanence of it makes my gut twist, its edges so fresh they look like they might catch fire again at any moment.
I can’t help it—I’m on my knees before I know I’ve moved, kneeling on the braided oval rug beside his bed. Tentatively, I lay my hand against his chest. His heartbeat thuds, strong. Unfaltering.
For a fleeting moment, I almost convince myself this is enough to ease my worry.
But as his breath shifts jaggedly beneath my palm, the doubt swells again. Spencer doesn’t stir, doesn’t wake. But neither does he seem entirely asleep.
His eyelids twitch, and a soft, hoarse sound escapes his lips. Something about it feels off, as if he’s balancing on the precipice of knowing again—somewhere between the past and future. Between before and after.
A drunken stupor from his premature celebration with Siobhan.
Passed out. He’s passed out.
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