Chapter 44 Seraphine!
Brea's POV
I got back to the penthouse with the supplies and set them on the kitchen counter and stood there looking at them for a moment.
Eleven thousand eight hundred and forty dollars worth of materials in a reinforced carry case. Paid for with a card belonging to a man who had just told me he didn't care what I did and then vanished before I could say anything worth saying.
I left the case on the counter and went to sit by the window.
I was still sitting there when Elias appeared from the corridor.
He looked at the case. Then at me. He didn't comment on either.
"Good," he said. "We start tonight."
What he did to the penthouse took four hours.
I watched him work and said nothing because there was nothing useful to say.
He moved the furniture himself efficiently, without asking for help and cleared the main floor entirely. Then he opened the case and began.
The rare minerals went down first, ground to powder and poured in precise lines across the floor.
The conductive salts followed, worked into the gaps between the mineral lines with something that looked like a very expensive brush.
The oils he applied last, using his fingers, tracing connections between the components in a pattern that I gradually understood was not decorative.
It was a circuit. By the time he finished, the floor of the penthouse looked like the inside of a computer.
It was a massive glowing diagram of interconnected lines and nodes that pulsed faintly with its own light.
Along one wall he had set up three screens connected to a central processing unit, the cables running from the hardware directly into the outer edge of the ritual diagram, anchored there with a compound I didn't recognize.
Magic and machine. Merged. "Sit," he said, pointing to the center node.
I sat. He crouched in front of me. In his hand was a small instrument fine-tipped, filled with what looked like ink but moved like something alive when he tilted it.
"Give me your arms," he said.
I extended them. He drew on my skin, both forearms, up to my elbow. Then he placed two small electrodes at my temples, attached by thin wires to the computer array.
When he sat back I looked like something between a medical patient and a ritual subject.
"Before we begin," he said, standing, "you need to understand what this is."
"Alright," I said.
"This is not a meditation exercise. This is not a controlled practice session." He looked at me directly.
“Once you get in, you can’t afford to lose focus—not even for a second. If your mind drifts, something breaks.”
“Best case… your body shuts down and you end up in a vegetative state.”His voice lowered.
“Worst case… your mind doesn’t find its way back at all. You die.”
He held her gaze.
“So be sure you’re ready before we start.”
"Why can't you do this yourself," I said. "You're supposed to be the best at what you do."
"I am the best at what I do," he said. "Which is why I know I cannot do this." He moved to the computer array.
"You unleashed those witches. You are the anchor your blood was part of what opened the circle, your power fed the bond. That makes you the only person whose mind can navigate this particular frequency." He sat down in front of the screens.
I looked at the glowing floor around me.
"If something goes wrong," I said.
"I will pull you out," he said. "Once. After that the connection closes permanently." He looked at the screens. "Don't make me use it."
He typed something. The circuit beneath me brightened.
"Close your eyes," he said.
I closed them. One moment I was sitting in the penthouse with electrodes at my temples and the smell of conductive salts around me.
The next I was somewhere else entirely an expanse that had no physical quality to it at all.
"Describe what you see." Elias's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, clear as if he were beside me.
"I see—" I paused. The words came out slower than I intended, each one placed with care. "A map. It's the whole world. But made of light."
"Good. Keep going." The map was vast. Continents rendered in glowing lines, oceans in negative space between them. And across it scattered, clustered, beacons. Different colors. Different intensities.
"There are lights," I said. "White ones. Lots of them are everywhere."
"Neutral practitioners," Elias said. "Ignore them. What else."
"Blue ones. Fewer. Scattered."
"Note them. Don't pursue. What else." I moved through the map. The white beacons were the most numerous, soft and constant. The blue ones pulsed at longer intervals.
Then I saw it. "There's a red one," I said.
Elias's voice sharpened. "Where."
"Here. Close." I tried to orient it. "The city. Somewhere in the city."
"Can you zoom in?"
"I don't know how to—"
"Don't think about how. You're not operating with logic right now. You're operating with instinct." A beat. "Push toward it."
I pushed.The resistance was immediate — like pressing against something that had no intention of yielding, that pushed back with equal and increasing force the harder I pressed. I kept going.
The map began to resolve around the red beacon, the surrounding area coming into focus, street by street, building by building.
In the penthouse, blood ran from my nose. I didn't feel it. Elias saw it on his screen the energy readings climbing past the projected threshold, the biometric data shifting in ways that made his jaw tighten and said nothing.
"Keep going," he said.
I kept going. The shroud around the beacon was the hardest thing I had ever pushed through.
My vision.... whatever vision meant in this place — began to fragment at the edges.
"Elias," I said, and my voice had changed as it was now stretched. "It's pushing back."
"I know. Push harder." Blood ran from my ears now. The screens were reading in the red.
"Harder," he said.
I pushed, then the shroud broke.
The map zoomed in until I was no longer looking at the city from above but standing inside a specific location...a room, dimly lit, old furniture, the smell of something that shouldn't have been possible to smell on an astral plane but reached me anyway.
And in the center of it was a woman. She wasn't looking at me at first.
She smiled, then turned directly into my mind.
“Hello, anchor,” she said not out loud.. “I’ve been wondering when you’d find me.”
The connection severed.
“Seraphine—!" My eyes snapped open in the penthouse.
Not gradually. Like a switch thrown....one moment the astral plane, the next the ceiling of the forty-third floor. Lights flickered. Two of Elias’s screens sparked, thin smoke rising from their casings.
I pressed both hands to my face. They came away dark blood from my nose, from my ears, already drying at the edges.