Chapter 25

“Where in the hell is he?” Amy muttered. It had been weeks since Finn’s last contact. He had warned her he was going deep to try to get more evidence she could use, but he had been totally silent.

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She ignored the text message and marked it as spam.

Amy ducked into a small deli, grabbed a cup of hot but horrible tasting coffee, and headed back outside in the cold drizzle and wind. She needed to get over to the library and use another random computer to look up the address of another possible contact.

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Damn the spam, she thought.

Then she stopped, looking at her phone. Finn had fiddled with it during their meeting. Now she was getting texts about the same key people incriminated by his information, from random phones all over the country. She had assumed it was yet another robo-text sending out phishing links, but why would they use those two senators in their scam?

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Amy did not want to trust a random link on her phone. Finn had warned her. But only Finn knew the people linked to the accounts he had shared with her. All three of the politicians on her list were now subjects of the texts she received. Coincidence?

She spotted a café advertising free wi-fi and crossed the seat to enter. Her laptop was as locked down as she and her tech person could make it. She fired up her VPN, bounced the signal around the world through proxies, and then fired up her anonymizing browser. Only then did she make a long press on the link to see the address it directed her to.

The link had numbers, not words. She typed them into the address bar of her browser, hesitated, and then hit enter.

A set of file folders appeared in the window. They bore the name of her and Finn’s suspects. She opened one and saw another set of files. Each was labeled with a long date and a word or phrase. She clicked on the one labeled “Dec-16-purchase-discreet”. The folder opened revealing several audio files.

Amy grabbed her ear buds before clicking on one of the files shown in the browser.

“I’ll be there with cash,” she heard a woman’s voice say. She suspected it was Congresswoman Samuelson herself but was not certain.

“It will be one fifty to get in the door.” The other voice said.

“That’s robbery,” the first voice replied. “Six-fifty for the night is extortion.”

“The one fifty will be applied to your purchase, assuming you have a winning bid. Our door fee is to limit our exposure. The other five hundred is the normal club nightly fee.”

“You change the terms of the auction to be cash only, and you jack up how much cash I need to bring? I won’t bid over five unless you have Lolita herself on the block. I want someone, but not that badly.”

“We know your tastes and have goods to suit.”

“You had better. I need this to be discrete. If there is even a hint of press, cops, or anything else, I won’t come in the door.”

“Discretion is our middle name, as you know.”

“What time?”

“The auction will begin at ten.”

“I’ll be there at nine-thirty, with your damned door fee. Don’t make me regret a trip out of town.”

The recording ended.

“Holy shit!” Amy muttered. If the recording was what she believed it to be, Finn or someone had sent her absolute gold for her article.

She clicked on the next link in the folder, and almost cried out as she heard the congresswoman arrange for a car and driver. She knew that address. It was a house gifted to a specialty sales and auction firm. It was time for her to move and start searching again.

“No, you can’t do it that way,” Yara sighed.

They were back at the Moon Pool of the Mountain, and Finn was trying to trace the lines of power he had sensed the night before. He was concentrating, focused on the flow from the spring deep within the pool, up to the surface where the tiny bubbles foamed and dissipated into a quantum foam.

“What do you mean?” He asked sharply. Yara had been less helpful today, focused on mundane language lessons for most of the morning and only relenting to revisit the pool well after noon.

“It’s not concentration you need. You must open yourself to the power of the goddess which flows through the pool. Sensing it is the first step, but then you must relax and let it permeate and surround your will. You are swimming against the tide when you need to let it embrace and carry you.”

“That makes no sense to me. It is power. It flows from the depths and then evaporates at the surface with only a tiny fraction remaining within the water of the pool. Not only that, but it does not care if I embrace it, or focus on it, or simply float within the water that carries it.”

Yara shook her head. “Don’t be a stubborn novice, Finn. Try to relax and let your senses open to the flow rather than focus on studying it.”

The word novice brought him up short. Since the prior day, she had avoided that label, and he refrained from calling her mistress, even in jest. For her to use it so deliberately now gave him pause.

He sighed and nodded. “Okay, I’ll try.”

His reward was a smile. “Sit next to the pool, and close your eyes,” she instructed. “What you seek is not visible anyway.” Finn did as he was told.

“Now listen to the gentle flow of the water and breathe in the moist air. Refuse thoughts of what should be, what is, and what was. Focus only on your breath and being present in this mystical place.”

Finn focused only on his breathing, falling into meditation he had been taught years ago in school and reinforced during his training. He wondered why he had stopped practicing the careful breathing, but then released the thought, since a still mind was his goal.

He sensed Yara sit next to him. “Feel the sense of wellness entering you with each breath,” she said softly. “Allow the touch of power carried in the moist air to embrace you.”

Finn breathed deeply. Then he felt something, almost jolting his eyes open. It was as if the tiny bubbles he felt in the water had been carried into his lungs. The quantum foam he had sensed tickled his throat. For an instant, he thought he would cough but then exhaled instead.

“Breathe,” Yara said softly.

Despite his eyes being closed, Finn saw the flickers of power swirling around him, each a minuscule pinpoint of light dancing in the darkness behind his eyelids. Breathing, he sensed them flow into his body and out again with each breath.

Tentatively, he imagined tapping one tiny point with his finger. It froze and then disappeared. Further away, it reappeared. He knew it was the same particle. Had he touched a quantum wave with his mind?

He opened his eyes, seeing the flow of power once again. It welled up from the depths and flowed into the sky above, but some of it, seemingly trapped in the water, flowed through the small channel spillway across the pool.

He closed his eyes, willing himself to follow that flow. Particles tumbled with the water over the stone pathway and down from the plateau. He traced them spilling through a gaping hole in the rock and collecting in a huge natural cistern within the mountain. Other springs fed the chamber, but no other sources of power flowed into the vast, dark cavern. It too, had an outlet, forming the cascading waterfall that fell down the side of the canyon to feed the pools of the temple and eventually fall into the lake far below.

But even there, the power continued flowing down. It escaped the lake and followed the river of the valley. Finn strained, forgetting to relax, and tried to sense where the power flowed to. Suddenly, his connection was lost.

He opened his eyes and looked to his right. Yara was staring at him intently.

“You sensed the power,” she said. It was not a question.

“I did. I was able to follow it out of the pool and down to the lake. I could feel the flow emptying into the river. I tried to follow it beyond but lost the thread.”

Yara considered him. “You’ve taken the first step in sensing, but you’ve also exceeded the ability of most sisters. I can scarcely feel the power in the lake below. For you to trace it beyond is incredible.”

Finn looked around the peaceful glade. He knew the tranquility of the place and understood why the sisters considered it holy. In his mind, however, it was the positive pole of a battery. To understand this power, he needed to see the negative pole as well.

“I think I need to travel more in your world,” he said. “I must find the power’s destination.”

As she slowly lifted her head, the rain drumming against her eyelids like a thousand tiny fingers, Elara blinked away the fog that clung to her vision. Her silver hair clung to her pale face, a tangle of wet locks. The muddy bank beneath her shifted as she sat up, the earth cool and damp against her skin. Elara took a deep breath of the primordial scent of wet leaves and decay that rose from the nearby forest floor. The smell felt both ancient and familiar, like a memory of a long-forgotten dream. Similarly, her recollection of the Celestial Realm felt both a memory and a dream at the same time. Elara’s gaze drifted out into the misty veil that shrouded everything around her — and then, with a quiet sigh, her eyes locked onto something just beyond the edge of her vision. The steaming waterfall she had traveled behind and beyond in her quest to meet her goddess. She was back where she had begun.

Realizing she could get no wetter, she slipped into the pool and swam under the waterfall, letting the pounding water clean much of the dirt and grime from her hair and body. She emerged, feeling renewed and awakened, into the cavern hiding the fold in space she had journeyed through. She looked at the ripple of air, and knew she should not temp the journey again. Her goddess had told her what she needed to do.

Only you can lift that spell, child.

The Moon Goddesses words echoed in her head as she climbed from the water and cast a spell to dry herself and re-weave her traveling clothes.

You must aid him and face what you fear.

The second part of her instructions made her tremble. Which of her fears must she face to aid Finn?

Elara busied herself for a few moments conjuring a glowing sphere of warming light and weaving a thick blanket from moonbeams. She sat, said a quick prayer of thanks, and then settled down to meditate until the rain outside stopped.

You must face the fear it is anchored upon. You must face your oppressor. You must face your future.

What fear was the geas anchored on? She knew she feared failure, but did not think that is what her goddess meant.

Elara thought back to her trials, the raid, and her capture, awakening in a prison, her humiliation, her rape. She hated that those things happened, but she refused to fear them. They were the past.

The fear the geas was anchored on was...

It eluded her. She breathed deeply, focusing inward in the mediative state of prayer novices were taught and acolytes sought to master. Slowly, she found her center.

In Finn’s world, when she first arrived and struggled to embrace her goddess’s gifts, she had thought she was abandoned. The sense of absolute despair from being separated from her sisters, her world, her mother, and her goddess had been overwhelming. Was that the fear the geas drew power from?

“How do I face that fear?” She asked herself softly.

“I must travel to the Realm of Shadow’s alone, and face this Malachi,” she said aloud, giving voice and commitment to her thoughts. “I know I can break this spell if I commit to being alone, for now. I don’t need assistance. I can rely on myself for this task, and any others that rise before me.”