Star Harbor Nights

When the act was done, they lay sprawled amid the wreckage of the altar. Somewhere along the way, time had fallen out of joint. Dani remembered the marble altar cracking beneath them at the moment of explosive climax, though she didn't remember climbing atop it.

"What did we do?" Dani asked, looking around in amazement. Aside from the ruin they'd made on the dais, the explosive conclusion of their impassioned activity had somehow altered the fiery runes of destruction that ringed the walls. The orange figures were now subtly outlined in blue.

"We re-dedicated the church," Luna said with a slight hitch in her voice, as though she were trying to keep from laughing. Her skin was luminous, her black hair held the luster of obsidian. "And corrupted the destroyer's spell..."

"You said we couldn't stop it."

"We haven't," Luna said. "Just threw a small kink into it: you. You're now linked to this, a part of it. Remember that... it will be important later."

"So, now, we..."

"Now, you go. The spell of destruction is set to begin, and they'll be coming soon," Luna said softly. "There's no way they didn't hear what we did... we lit a beacon to the heavens, and anything that knows how to look will have seen it from miles away. My presence will continue to draw them here... you should go now, before they surround us."

"I could stay and help you fight," Dani said. She felt shaky, and a little weak in the knees... but somehow more powerful. Before, she had only used the ring's power. Now she knew that its power was hers... in coming together with La Luna, she and the ring had somehow become one. "Make sure we take them all down..."

"No," Luna said firmly. "If they see you, they'll follow when you leave... and you do have to leave. You can turn invisible?"

"Yeah, but... uh... once per day," Dani said.

"Go now, then," Luna said, getting to her feet.

"But... I..."

"Go!" Luna commanded, in a voice that was filled with the power they'd generated. "Run!"

Dani ran.

The night had turned dark and nasty while Dani had been indoors. The sky was clouded over, and thunder rumbled all around. It started in the distance, rolling across the sky to be answered by crashes from other clouds. All at once, the street lights went out. Dani paused, uncertain for a moment... then ran on all the faster, still impelled by the force of Luna's command.

She fought that impulse, beat it down with every ounce of willpower she possessed... which was more than she ever would have believed, though it didn't seem enough. Then there was a sound behind her which demanded attention, and she was able to stop and turn to look back down the long avenue at the bright blue flames erupting from the roof of the old church. The glow illuminated the many man-like shapes which lurched with unnatural speed towards its open doors... scores of the things, most on the ground but more than a few dozen walking down through the empty air.

Over the roar of the fire, Dani thought she heard laughter, high and fierce and wild. She took the first step back down towards the burning church, but then a voice in her head said Don't be stupid. Luna's voice... her imagination, or were they still connected? She took another step. There was a stirring within the crowd of dark figures. Several of them broke off and started towards her.

Run, the voice said again... and again, she ran.

A machine gun burst of lightning raced across the sky and lit up the world, briefly. Looking up the street as it rose steeply away from the harbor, Dani saw a figure standing in the middle of the avenue. The sky dimmed, and all was dark once more. She turned on her heel and plunged down a side street, away from the mysterious figure... she had seen horrors enough for one night.

The heavily laden sky opened up its reservoirs. She heard the rapid patter of the rain as it landed on the tops of the buildings before she felt it. She heard the booming crack of thunder close at hand, and then a great bolt of lightning split the air before her, blackening the pavement and sending up a shower of sparks. Dani shielded her eyes... and then opened them to look back into the face of a strange woman. She was tall... mostly legs... and thin, with very angular features, and dressed in oiled black leather armor. The wind seemed to whip and whirl around her in particular.

The woman jerked her head back, and there came another crash of thunder, louder than any Dani had ever heard, with another sound mingled in. She couldn't tell if the strange woman had yelled something or if she'd made some kind of harsh animal cry, but the sound definitely came from her mouth.

"Who are you?" Dani shouted over the rising squall. "What do you want?"

The woman began stepping forward. She had an unusual hopping, swinging gait that struck Dani as cocky. If this woman was there to fight, her confidence was unnerving.

"I'm not afraid of you," Dani shouted, brandishing her ringed fist. "Back off!"

The woman stopped, turning and cocking her head to the side to regard Dani through a single eye. She paused, considered, and then held out her hand.

Dani stepped back again. The wind howled wildly all around them. She turned away, only to find that the pursuing wraiths were close at hand, impossibly close, charging straight at her and the woman with their uncannily fast gait. Their bony jaws clacked, their empty mouths gaped as if they were baying for blood.

Another bolt of lightning split the air, striking in the midst of the silently howling pack. It obliterated one skeleton and scattered several others, breaking bones but not slowing the group as a whole. Dani felt a strong hand on her shoulder and she was lifted and pulled back. The strange woman stepped forward in front of her. She made no sign or gesture, but all at once a great wind roared down from above, sluicing down over Dani's head. It battered and buffeted the skeletal wraiths, hurtling them back away from the pair and shattering several more of them.

It was a temporary reprieve. All too soon, the monstrosities were picking themselves back up, and piecing themselves back together. The tall woman sent one more thunderbolt slamming down among them (it had to be her, Dani knew, even though she didn't seem to be doing anything) and then turned back and extended her hand to Dani once more.

This time, she took it.

Panic overwhelmed Dani as she felt every hair on her body stand up, every inch of her skin tingle. She screamed and threw herself to the side, but not quickly enough. The next lightning strike enveloped the two of them, blasting through her body with the force of an explosion. She felt herself obliterated, ripped apart atom by atom and then she was torn away from the world, sent spiraling off into blackness.

Dani could feel herself screaming, but she didn't seem to have any voice. She could hear nothing beyond a continual crackling buzz, she could see nothing beyond electric blue flashes. She had no physical sensation whatsoever, just the feeling of being diffused, spread out over a very large area of space. She sensed a shifting, a gathering of power, and then felt a sensation of being drawn together. She hurtled down to the ground at speeds beyond her imagining, felt herself pulled back together in the blink of an eye.

She collapsed to the ground, shaky and reeking of ozone but whole and unharmed.

The lightning woman was kneeling beside her, still holding her hand. She helped Dani to her feet, brushing her static-charged hair down with her fingers. Dani realized they were in an alley. She had the sense that they had not left Star Harbor, but beyond that, she didn't know exactly where they were. There was an unmarked door, painted black, set into the brick wall. The woman walked right to it and pushed it open, not exactly pulling Dani along with her but not exactly waiting to see what she would do, either.

They passed through a dim, candlelit chamber and into a darkly elegant bar room that was completely different from any of the nightclubs that Dani had been in since finding the ring. In her shell-shocked state, she wasn't quite sure that her mind was correctly processing the report of her eyes... she was lead in a daze past the curious and baleful stares of many bizarre creatures she halfway recognized, to a shadowed staircase at the other end of the room. The next day, Dani would remember little of the bar, the staircase, or the upstairs hallway, but when her armored escort opened the door at the end of the hall, Dani's perceptions became much more vivid and clear.

The light from the hall, dim though it was, spilled forward to light up a rectangle of marble inlaid floor. The rest of the room was almost pitch black, but the impression Dani got was that it was cavernous. There were fluttering shapes moving about in the darkness. For an unsettling moment, Dani thought it must be bats, but then the room became illuminated as the candles of three crystal chandeliers lit themselves. They did not exactly flare to life... it was exactly the effect of flame burning out, but reversed.

She gasped.

The grand ballroom spread out before her was more lush and opulent than anything Dani could have imagined, but that was not what had provoked her astonished reaction.

The dance floor was full of whirling, dancing masks... half masks, full masks, domino masks, cat eye masks... all decorated with sequins and peacock feathers in royal shades of purple, green, and gold. They floated at face height, spinning and bobbing with the motions of unseen heads and bodies, all exactly in time with unheard music. In the center of it there stood a woman in a flowing gown of velvet and taffeta. Her face and head were entirely covered by a porcelain mask and a high-topped powdered wig.

"Greetings, child," the regal woman said, making a half-curtsy and extending a gracious gesture with her hand. "I see that my invitation has found its way to you. Please, do come closer."

"Who are you?" Dani asked, even as she obeyed. She found herself unconsciously stepping out of the way of the invisible dancers, though she was not sure how solid their bodies might be. Her silent new companion followed close behind her.

"I am who I am, that is all you need know," she replied. "You have gone through many trials tonight, and you will go through many more... depending on what you now choose."

"Choose?" Dani echoed.

"Yes, choose," the masked woman repeated. "There must always be a choice. You have been given great power, and a new body to enjoy it with. Do you embrace your new life completely, or do you go back and pick up the old one where you left it off?"

"I... can't I keep doing both?"

"Child, until this day, you have been doing neither," the woman said. "Keeping yourself locked away in your bedroom... hiding away in dark corners of bars... neither is the sort of life worth speaking of. If you keep your new form, you will have the power of the ring and all that it has given you, but your life will no longer belong to you... as your friend was bound, so will you be. More, you will be lost to your family. There is nothing in you now that would be recognized by those who knew your former self, whose disappearance will always be a painful mystery."

"But if I go back?"

"What the bitch of Hecate did has burned away much of what you were, but that will be undone... if you will yourself to be apart from the ring, if you truly give it up. All that you have become will be taken, and your memories of this night--and the other ones--will become like a dream that fades away over time. Not all the psychological effects will be gone, but you will never quite know what it is that frightens you about a moonless night, or what it was that you had and lost."

"Those aren't very good choices," Dani said.

"They never are. Know this as well... you and your friend have conspired to break the power of the Bone Lords, yet they will rise again... and they will not be forgiving," the woman said. "And more pressingly, even now, a force far darker than they stirs. You must be prepared to face both, if you stay as you are."

"I can't," Dani said. "I can't face anything."

"You would have your friend's death be for nothing?"

"If I'm supposed to choose, why are you trying to convince me?" Dani asked.

"My child, I am not," the woman said calmly. "I am merely telling you what is... and what will be... depending upon your choice."

"I need time to decide."

"Of course you do," the woman said. "You are grieving and frightened and in no state to be making a life-altering decision."

"Thank you," Dani said, profoundly relieved.

"Unfortunately, you must choose now."

"I can't!"

"You can and you must," the woman insisted. "More so, you will. You are choosing right now, even as one part of you is concocting more feeble denials against the inevitable. You know in your heart already, do you not? Your choice is all but made... the feelings come, whether you will them or no... and feelings become thoughts... and thoughts become actions. You have made up your mind."

"No!" Dani protested. "I haven't decided anything!"

"If that is how you would have it... you need not tell me what you've chosen, for I already know," she said, then stopped, seeming to notice the other woman in the room for the first time. "Oh, and as for you, little bird, our business is concluded. You are free to resume your own path as you will."

In response, the woman dropped her strong, thin hand once more on Dani's shoulder and stepped forward protectively.

"So that is the way of it?" the masked woman said archly. It didn't quite sound like a question. "Very well. I have other pressing matters to attend to. Child, you may leave. The black door will let you out somewhere near your home."

The candles went out with an alarming finality, leaving Dani standing in a pool of light which streamed in from the doorway through which she'd entered the ballroom. The dancing masks clattered unseen to the floor.

Numbly, Dani turned and left. She followed the same path out as she had gone in, through the bar and the candlelit antechamber to the dark door. It opened out into the alley behind the hardware store up the street from her apartment. She'd been in that alley before, but didn't remember ever seeing a plain black door there before... though strangely, she couldn't remember not having seen it.

After her behavior in the ballroom, Dani had half expected the woman who called the lightning to follow her out of the strange bar, but she was both relieved and disappointed to find herself alone in the alley except for a large black bird. Ordinarily, the sight of a raven at night would have been ominous... but she'd reached her limit for such things. She waved her hand at the creature to shoo it away, and it obligingly fluttered up to the roof of the hardware store.

Normally, Dani would take off her ring before climbing the fire escape outside her building... but she wanted to do it quickly and quietly, and that called for the grace and power of her mystically enhanced adult form. She'd left her window open a crack, just enough to get her fingers inside and slide it open. Once inside, she sunk down into the battered easy chair that sat in front of her computer desk, slipped off the ring, and let it clatter down onto the metal desktop.

"You're not still up in there, are you?" Dani's mom asked through the thin wooden door. Dani started... and looked in horror and amazement as she caught a glimpse of the face which was reflected in the black screen of the monitor. It was the face of a sixteen year old, but not the same pimpled teenage face that had looked out of that dark surface a hundred times before.

Instead, it was a younger version of the woman Dani became with the ring... a face that, as the masked woman had said, nobody who knew Dani would recognize.

A girl's face.

"Daniel?" Dani's mother asked, hand on the iron knob.

Dani's hand darted for the ring.