The End of Magic (The Witches of Echo Park #3)(30)

What he was saying made a certain kind of sense. She'd never thought about what would happen if she fell asleep while she was visiting the dreamlands-a trip she'd been making almost nightly since she was a child.

"I don't know," she said, truly curious about the answer.

He grinned back at her, inclining his head in the direction of the Red Chapel-and she was reminded again of how handsome he was, especially when he smiled.

"Let's take them inside and I'll tell you."

"All right," she said, and grinned back at him as she followed him away from the fairyland.

They walked in silence, and like a mood ring, the dreamlands began to change with her emotional state. The scent of the small child in her arms had made her nostalgic for her mother, and while she watched, the landscape followed this bittersweet train of thought, morphing into a field of flowers she'd played in once when she was a child . . . a sea of yellow buttercups that she'd run through with her mother, their squeals of delight trapped in the amber of her mind. Lizbeth was impressed by the depth of detail the dreamlands took away when it plumbed her memories. She bit back tears as she and Tem moved through the plain of bright flowers, their honey-yellow pollen staining her feet and legs. 

"You're doing this, you know," Tem said, as the wind gusted across the field, the song of a hundred thousand petals dancing on the breeze filling the air.

"Not on purpose," she said.

"No, not on purpose," he agreed.

They finally reached the edge of the buttercups and stepped across a moat of neon-green grass encircling the Red Chapel. Only now the chapel was just a giant square box assembled from long beams of hammered redwood timber with an oddly slanted bloodred door cut into its side. The door was a gnarly-looking thing that reminded Lizbeth of a bloody gash. It was unsettling and she found herself shrinking away from it.

"Bad things have happened in this place," Lizbeth said.

"They have," Tem said as he stood before the horrible door, one hand on the doorknob. "Blood sisters died at the Red Chapel."

Lizbeth shivered.

"But death, as you know, is not the end."

She nodded.

"I know."

"Step inside and put your burden down," Tem said, turning the knob and pushing the door open. All Lizbeth could see inside was darkness. "This way."

He crossed the threshold, Marji still sleeping in his arms, and disappeared inside.

All Lizbeth could do was follow.





Lyse





There were just some things you didn't know you could do until, all of a sudden, you were just doing them. That was how Lyse learned she could physically go to the dreamlands . . . and bring other people along with her.

"Holy hell," Arrabelle said, staring at Lyse like she'd just watched her eat a newborn baby. "How the hell did you do that?"

Lyse wished she had a better answer than "I don't really know," but she didn't. As soon as the blue orb had popped, she'd known exactly where she'd taken them, but not how. It had all come from instinct . . . a little voice inside her head that told her to pull off at the diner and head for the back of the parking lot. Part of her, the same part that encouraged her to follow this instinct, wondered if she'd been drawn to the specific place because there was a flow line running through it. That her personal magic was even more powerful when she drew from the bands of magical energy encircling the Earth. It seemed like a reasonable assumption, but she had so little training in magic that it was only a guess.

As much as she loved Eleanora, Lyse would always be a little angry with her grandmother for shielding her from the truth: that they were both witches. If only Eleanora had trusted her enough to bring Lyse into the fold sooner, maybe then she wouldn't be so in the dark about her abilities. She knew that Eleanora had wanted her to have a normal life-had "protected" Lyse from the supernatural world of the covens because she loved Lyse-but dammit, sometimes she just wanted to punch her grandmother in the arm and yell at her for being so stupid.

Once again, she found herself frustrated by this train of thought and decided that it was a dead end for her. Best to put it away and focus on the problems at hand.

"Well, I don't know for sure," Lyse said, wishing she had more info and wasn't just making an educated guess. "But I think my abilities were augmented by a flow line."

Lyse shrugged. She knew this wasn't the answer Arrabelle was looking for, but it was all she had.

"So these are the dreamlands," Niamh said, green eyes wide as she took in the landscape around them.