Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [26]
So if the magic was real … were the dreams?
She wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet.
She began to experiment, using ideas taken from books she’d read, fantasies where magic was real.
Lighting a candle: easy. Seeing through the eyes of a bird: piece of cake. Putting magic into an object …
There was this girl at school who Elizabeth felt kind of exasperated with and sorry for at the same time. Janine was nice enough, but she’d gotten mixed up with this guy who controlled practically every moment of her life. She stayed with Tommy because he said he loved her—and she said she loved him even after she ended up in the hospital and had to stay for three days. She told everybody she’d “fallen down the stairs”—but everyone who knew Tommy knew what had really happened to put Janine into the hospital.
So Elizabeth decided she was going to do something about it. The magic that made people change their minds about things was pretty much always the same—according to the books—you just varied what you wanted them to do. Elizabeth swiped Janine’s sunglasses; they were expensive designer ones, but besides that, the girl had to wear them sometimes to hide her dark circles and even an occasional black eye. She returned them the next day—enchanted. “See him the way we see him,” was the enchantment she’d put on them—appropriate for a pair of glasses!
It worked better than she had ever dreamed it would. The next day Tommy was in jail on assault charges, and Janine was wondering aloud what she’d ever seen in him.
But Elizabeth’s triumph was short-lived. Because after that, she started seeing things—while she was awake.
At first it was just out of the corner of her eye. Something moving impossibly fast, something that wasn’t there when she turned her head to look at it. Eyes in shadows.
But then she started seeing them clearly, in daylight.
They never showed up except when she was alone—when she was walking back from school was the first time she saw one by daylight. She had turned a corner, and realized the street was deserted, and too, too quiet. And there he was, standing in a challenging pose in the middle of the sidewalk, as if daring her to pass. A black blot that seemed to absorb all the sunlight, staring at her—he didn’t wear the black-washed armor and helm of her dreams, but she knew him, knew what he was, as he stared at her from beneath the brim of a black hat, black trench coat down to his ankles, open to the breeze, and showing black jeans and a tight black tee.
She froze like a scared baby bunny.
Then a little mob of grade school kids came around the corner, laughing and shrieking, and she turned involuntarily. And when she looked back, he was gone.
He—they—were something she remembered from her dreams, the menacing Knights of the Shadow.
But he, or more like him, kept popping up, and soon they appeared whether she was alone or not. Staring at her out of a crowd of spectators at a game. Lurking outside the school, right where she would see him when she looked out the window. Cruising by in a black SUV. And nobody else seemed to see him—or them, if there was more than one.
At that point, she wanted to think she really was finally going crazy. Because being crazy would have been better than what her dreams were telling her, what her instinct and everything she’d experienced was telling her.
Her dreams weren’t fantasy. They were truth. She’d been Yseult of Ireland, wife of Mark, lover of Tristan. Sorceress, healer. She was back—and so, somewhere, were Mark and Tristan. And so were … others. How many others, she didn’t know for sure, but she knew of one, whose name she shuddered even to think about. The one the Shadow Knights served. The one who meant the Shadow Knights to claim her and make her kneel at his feet, surrendering her power to him.
Of course, her family stood between her and him and not even the Shadow Knights could do anything about that. This