Chapter 10

Cassie bolted upright, only to nearly fall onto her back again when the room spun around her for a moment. Once the sensation passed, she jumped out of bed as if afraid she would somehow be sucked back into the dreamverse again.

She stood by the bed, panting as if having just run up the stairs, still shivering from her brush with the edge of the Darkness' inner domain. She placed a trembling hand against her cheek and closed her eyes, only to gasp and open them again when the terrible sight of the corrupted line energies leapt into her mind.

She rushed into the bathroom and turned on the light, blinking at the sudden glare. She stared at herself in the mirror, then looked down. Wasn't it Melinda who said you could see your own Aura if you were affected by the Darkness? She dearly hoped that was true.

Cassie turned away and stepped back into her bedroom. Outside her window, night was giving way to pre-dawn twilight. She rubbed her eyes and sat down on the edge of her bed, running a hand through her disheveled curls.

She gave up any hope of getting more sleep. Closing her eyes would just bring back the imagery again, and she would never feel warm. She stared at the cell phone on her night table as her thoughts turned to the memory of the phone call to Jason the day before.

She trembled and wrapped her arms around herself. The line had moved. The same question whipped through her head as it had for Debby Radson: how was that even possible without the Book?

She snatched up the cell phone and leapt to her feet. She was a second away from pressing the speed dial for Jason's number when she stopped. Besides being too early, she was not sure she would ever reach him if his mother had been taken by the Darkness.

She felt a terrible ache in her heart. Jason had always been the first one to whom she had turned. His logical approach balanced her emotional one. If the Harbingers ever lost that...

Cassie shivered and brought up Ned's number but stopped herself again. She uttered a loud sigh and slapped her hands to her sides as she stomped towards the bay window. Bad enough her own parents had problems with Ned, she did not want to get his parents upset as well. He could do little more than Cassie could.

"I have to do something," she muttered. "I have to know if everyone's okay."

She lifted the phone up and dialed.

Debby sat at the dining room table brooding over a cup of tea and casting a morose look at the weather monitor mounted on the wall. The outside temperature had not risen much above the nineteen degrees at which it had stood since she had been awakened again by her daughter's disturbed dreams.

Her Pagan beliefs said every season was special and necessary in the yearly cycle. That morning, however, she found little to enjoy about winter. She was desperate to perform a ritual which would better protect her daughter from outside influence, but it had to be done outside while wearing as little as possible. She would either be too cold wearing only a light wrap or silk robe to do the ritual effectively at best or she would frostbite her fingers and toes at worst.

The sound of the phone gave her a jolt, and she uttered a mild curse when hot tea splashed on her hand.

She set down the cup and shook her scalded hand as she crossed the room. She glanced at the caller ID and snatched the receiver from the hook. "Cassie, hello. Are you all right?"

"Yes, Mrs. Radson," came Cassie's strained voice. "But I'm not sure Jason is."

Debby closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. "Goddess ... what's happened now?"

"I got a call from him ... Mrs. Radson, did you just say what's happened now?"

"A lot has happened since I last saw you."

Cassie paused. "It's about the lines, isn't it? Someone moved one of them."

Debby straightened up. "Yes! But how did you..." She trailed off, her eyes widening. "You did it? You Projected yourself successfully?"

"Yes, twice now," Cassie replied in a quavering voice.

"That's wonderful! It came to you that easily? And you were able to tell that the line had moved? That means you have an innate sense of the line forces when you--"

"Mrs. Radson, please. Let me tell you about Jason."

Debby's heart ached when it sounded as if Cassie were close to tears. "Yes, of course, I'm terribly sorry. Please, go on."

Cassie told her about the phone call and what she saw when she had Projected herself the night before. "I can't sense him anymore over the link. Or Melinda. Richie I can still sense a tiny bit. Heather as well, but I can tell she's back under Ms. Bendon's thrall already. Only you, Diane, and Ned can I sense fully, and even Diane had faded from me for a brief time Thanksgiving morning."

"Oh, great Goddess," Debby whispered, covering her eyes with her hand.

"I have no idea how badly Jason's mother was affected. I'm guessing that was what I was seeing, the Darkness reaching out through the line. Jason always told me that his mother never had contact with anyone affected by the Darkness, so this is the only way it could get at her."

Debby nodded halfway through Cassie's statement. "Yes, I believe you're correct. And I know why Diane faded out yesterday." She told Cassie what had happened between Diane and Penny Sovert.

"Oh, goodness, is she okay?!" Cassie cried.

"Yes, she's fine, she managed to resist Mrs. Sovert. Explanations as to how will have to wait. Later she called me with the revelation of the moved line. She was the first who figured it out."

"But how did it move?"

"It has to be the Book," Debby said in a shaky voice. "Enough of it must have survived for the Darkness to learn the spells to move the line. It probably has other spells for manipulating the line energies, which explains why you saw it extending tendrils of itself."

Cassie uttered a despairing sigh. "Mrs. Radson, I have to know if Jason is okay, but I doubt I'll ever be able to reach him on the phone."

"Cassie, it's okay. I'll check on him myself. I'll go over to his house later this morning."

Cassie gasped. "M-Mrs. Radson, are you sure that's safe?"

Debby thought of her daughter earlier, writhing in erotic torment upon the sheets of her bed, panties soaked with unrelenting arousal. Susan had to be forced to awaken so she could relieve some of the sexual tension. Debby was likely the only mother not affected by the Darkness who purchased sex toys for her own daughter. "No, I don't think this is at all safe," she said in a strained voice. "But I have to do it. I'm ... I'm a Harbinger. I have an obligation to all of you."

"But you were worried about protecting your daughter."

Debby's fingers tightened around the receiver. Don't make this any harder for me, she thought. "I will most likely meet Jason's mother, and I can tell how badly under the influence of the Darkness she is. While I can't see the Dark Auras, I will be right on one of the lines so my power to see psychic auras will be enhanced."

"But if the Darkness tries to get you ... oh God, I can't imagine losing you, too!"

"I refuse to believe we have lost anyone," Debby said in what she hoped sounded like a firm voice of motherly authority. "I truly believe we would know such a thing for sure, just like how we can always sense poor Heather is under Laura Bendon's control."

"I hope you're right, Mrs. Radson," said Cassie. "Please, call me the moment you know anything. I'll contact Ned later this morning."

"We should all find a way to get together at some point this weekend."

"It can't be today. We're having several social functions at the mansion and my mother already told me she expects me to be at every one. I think she was spooked by what happened yesterday and doesn't want to let me out of her sight."

"That's all right, Cassie, I ... oh, no, what happened?"

"I don't want to go into it right now. I'd rather wait until I have time to talk to you about it."

"All right, but I'm going to hold you to that. I promise to call you later."

"Thank you, Mrs. Radson," Cassie said, her voice gushing with relief. "I don't know what we would do without you."

Jason rose just before dawn after a fitful night's sleep. He had managed slumber only after reattaching the power cable to the computer. He drew enough comfort from the whir of the cooling fans and the blink of the network activity light to allow him a few hours sleep, though his still agitated mind would not let him rest much past morning twilight.

Jason stumbled out of bed and jammed his glasses to his face. He turned to the computer and grasped the top edge of the chair, but uttered a small sigh and turned away. He had no idea how much time he had before his mother would rise and insist on more "family time" as she usually did on the day after Thanksgiving. For once he wished the high school did not give that day off.

He grabbed Elizabeth's journal from under the bed. His nose was already in the pages before he flopped back onto his bed. He felt he was too close to a breakthrough to stop now, and if there were ever a time he needed one, this was it.

Elizabeth had detailed Victor's activities. She had uncovered his cult and where they were holding their rituals. She described several encounters with the man, becoming too frequent for her to consider them coincidence anymore. He skimmed over most of them, silently demanding she return to her research into techniques to block the Darkness' influence. He finally found this:

Jason's head snapped up when he heard the floorboards in the hallway creak. After a pause, the shower in the master bath ran. As much as he hated stopping here, he did not want to risk his mother seeing him with the journal.

Jason re-bundled the papers and shoved them under the bed. He jumped up and crossed to his computer desk in one long stride, dropping into the seat with a thump.

He brought up the web browser, but the community board was still empty save for the same volunteer jobs he had seen the day before. He frowned at the computer screen. Using his father's PC the day before had been a stupid idea. He had all but announced he was conducting surveillance on his father. That was likely the last time he would manage to obtain the password.

Not that the surveillance had gained anything. His father had been right in that he kept nothing about work on the home PC. Jason had even used a program to reconstruct the bits of deleted files (since most filesystems deleted files simply by removing a directory entry and marking the disk space as free), but this had turned up nothing.

Maybe there's just nothing to find, he thought.

Rather than deal with the potential inconvenient truth, he brought up a text editor and browsed the output log of the script which had finished moments before his mother had forced him to shut down the computer. Much of it consisted of error messages from servers which had managed to stymie his attempts at infiltration. Interspersed with these were dumps of information from sites which he had breached: a listing of deposits from an ATM; a list of names and credit card numbers from a bookstore; a detailed report of gallons of gasoline pumped from a particular gas station along an interstate highway in the Midwest.

All had one thing in common: they may be places Richie's father Mike Hendon had been in the past four months.

What little free time Jason had over the past month had been spent leading him to this point. The latest breakthrough a few days before Thanksgiving had narrowed his search when he discovered the man's name in the roster of a trucking company. Now he could concentrate his search on the company's shipping routes.

He was nearly at the end of the file, expecting to come up empty again, when he came upon a list of transactions at a grocery store in southwestern Iowa. He spotted Mike's name in a transaction for $62.67, accompanied by an image of a scanned check. Jason brought up the JPEG file in an image-viewer; written in the lower left corner was a phone number.

Jason scrambled to copy the number down on a post-it note just as the shower shut off. He closed out of the image and the log and activated the screensaver. He looked at the number and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans which hung over the foot of the bed. As he headed into the bathroom for his own shower, he wondered how he would ever get out of the house long enough to inform Richie what he had found.

Audrey stepped out of the shower, prickly and shivering as the icy water lingering on her skin evaporated in the morning chill. Her nipples stood out like two hard, narrow knobs, the areolae slightly puckered. Her teeth chattered as she grabbed the robe and pulled it on, tying the sash with a vicious yank.

She grasped the edge of the sink, her wet hair sending rivulets down her shoulders, back, and breasts. Her breath was still a harsh pant from the impact of the cold shower and her efforts to banish the demons which her dreams had conjured during the night.

What are demons or angels except that which we choose to believe?

Audrey shuddered and closed her eyes. Sometimes she could almost see the voice, like another entity sharing her mind. As alien as its words were, she sensed a disturbing familiarity as well, as if these dark images were somehow conjured from her own thoughts.

Perhaps that is true, and you are only now giving leave to them.

Audrey swallowed and snatched the bath towel from the rack. She patted her hair until it no longer dripped and picked up the hairdryer, only to set it down again when her hand was shaking too badly. She stared at herself in the mirror and tried to see the plain, forty-something mother with whom she had been content for the past six years.

Instead, she slowly tugged the edge of the robe until one of her breasts was bared, the nipple still erect, the flesh soft and enticing. A husky sigh passed her lips as she tugged the sash, her eyes still riveted to her reflection, until it came undone and her sex appeared, perfectly framed by her wide hips.

You've denied your desires for so long.

Audrey shook her head, but the cold shower had failed to do anything for the growing heat between her legs. The more she tried to forget her dreams, the more they spun in her head, until her pussy glistened and ached with need.

She glanced towards the bathroom door. "If ... i-if I could just ... if he ... no, I can't, not Henry. I..."

Audrey let out a husky sigh as her pussy became too hot and wet for her to ignore. The aroma of her own arousal teased her until she slid her trembling fingers downward, her hips jerking slightly at the first touch against her slick folds. She panted softly as she swirled her fingertips against her clit, the same way Henry would do just before he...

"Oh God, I can't think about that," Audrey moaned. She spread her legs and tilted her body forward, her fingers plunging into her cunt. Her nipples brushed the terrycloth of the robe, and she gasped at the sharp spikes of pleasure which radiated from them.

You most assuredly can think about it.

Audrey rocked her hips against her hand, her eyes half-lidded, two fingers plunging into her rising pussy with each thrust. She pawed one of her breasts with her free hand, shivering and moaning when she pinched the nipple and felt it throb as if in a miniature orgasm of its own.

She shook her head again, but with far less conviction. "I-I can't," she whimpered. "I can't think about ... a-about something I..."

Something you can't have?

Audrey grunted as she slammed her hips against her hand, three fingers filling her now. She closed her eyes and saw herself riding a nice, thick cock, her breasts bouncing with each thrust, bodies slapping together in raw lust. Her pleasure climbed but not fast enough to suit her pent-up need.

You most certainly can have cock again.

Audrey's emotions whirled in a tumult of conflict. Dark and forbidden desires roiled in the dark depths of her mind, daring to rise into the light. Denial only seemed to empower them, as if meeting her force with equal resistance. Or perhaps it was the force and she was the resistance.

Her hand left her breast and gripped the counter, her hips rocking. She opened her eyes but the imagery remained, her desire escalating. Her dreams from the night before played themselves out again, and she was forced to watch herself couple with the most impossible of partners.

Hardly impossible at all.

Audrey tried to shake her head but managed only to look away for a moment. Her eyes returned to the mirror, but the mother could barely be seen anymore. She saw only lust denied.

Yet the mother was still there. The mother's eyes shimmered and begged to be freed of these horrible desires. The mother wanted to go back to the way things were, with an attentive husband and an obedient son. The mother wanted to love and protect her child. The mother wanted everything back to normal.

Oh, but there is nothing which is abnormal about this.

Audrey clenched her teeth as she rode the phantom cock to the straining precipice of climax. She tried one last time to think about how young Jason was, how she would not see him hurt for the world, how she loved him as a son.

Just as she rode her dark fantasy over the edge into throbbing orgasm, the image burst into her head of her riding Jason's nice, hard cock.

Audrey stumbled back from the sink as her cunt clenched around her fingers. She bumped hard against the laundry hamper, her fingers still rubbing her pulsing sex. The breath she had been holding exploded from her mouth in a loud gasp. She imagined Jason's cock throbbing inside her, and her hips jerked as if receiving his final thrusts.

Was that so bad now?

Audrey wheezed from the effort not to cry out as her orgasm rolled through her whole body, her breathing briefly caught in the same staccato rhythm. A post-coital ache came in the wake of her fading climax, a sensation as wonderful as her original arousal had been.

Was playing to a little harmless fantasy all that big a deal?

Audrey panted hard as she forced herself away from the wall. Her fingers still swirled slowly against her clit, as if seeking to continue the moment. She reluctantly withdrew her hand and stepped up to the mirror. She stared at herself, the insides of her thighs damp.

She managed a tiny smile. Yes, a fantasy. That's all it was. She wouldn't really do that. Just a fantasy. It had to be. She was still a good mother.

Oh, you are a VERY good mother.

Audrey straightened, and her smile widened. Yes, she knew she was. She would keep her son on the right path, just like she had yesterday when she made him promise to seek a job. That would make everything right again. He would learn responsibility and be away from all the bad influence.

And you have found a new way in which to love him.

Audrey paused for a long moment, then slowly nodded. She picked up the hairdryer with a far more steady hand, eager to get on with the rest of the day.

Melinda emerged from the bathroom, still brushing out her hair, and gazed at her sister's empty bed with a sigh. She gave her hair a few last strokes with the brush and tossed it onto her bed, if for no other reason than she knew that failing to put stuff away pissed off her mother.

She wished Heather had at least tried to wake her up before leaving. Then again, Heather had likely descended far into Laura Bendon's thrall again, and hearing her gush about her sexy outfit or her wonderful Mistress would have driven Melinda crazy.

She trotted to the dresser and bent down to open one of the bottom drawers. She felt the weight of her breasts as they dangled under her, an experience she was still getting used to. She snatched a pair of panties and held them up for a moment.

"I wonder if I should even bother trying," she muttered.

She glanced towards the bedroom door. She heard faint sounds from her father's office but nothing else. Her mother was still out. Her mother's schedule was so irregular that she had no idea if her mother were actually working at the Inn that day.

Melinda stepped into the panties and yanked them up her legs, letting go of the waistband with a snap. She let out a relieved sigh when she felt no discomfort and no immediate urge to remove them. She did not question how odd it was that her mother would forget to replace the nudity trigger after Thanksgiving was over; at this point, she would take whatever advantage she could get regardless of the circumstances.

She pulled out a bra and had thrust her arms into the straps when she paused and pulled it back off again. She raced into the bathroom and stared at her bosom, turning her torso to one side and the other.

She saw herself in her mind as she was a year ago when she had performed this same ritual. Her breasts had been little more than two vaguely round swellings, attached to a narrow-hipped, boyish frame. She would have given anything to look even close to what she did that day.