The Eighth Gate

22 | Lock and Key

It came to her in flashes.

Brief images marked the backs of her eyelids with a seemingly eternal brand that melted away as quickly as it had appeared, eaten up by flames. Glimpses of a forgotten memory—of Mary the night Noah passed away—played out before her. They were unfocused and flickering, as if her throbbing mind were a video projector and her eyelids were the screens, lit up by the sporadic light of the wild flames around her. She was seeing everything through her eyes, seeing her hands do things she hadn’t previously recalled them doing, like reaching into a wardrobe for the Designator. She felt that familiar pain prick her arm again when she grabbed it, and suddenly Mary could hear whispers in her ears, indiscernible yet clear at the same time, and then words skittered across the screen, some written in lettering she couldn’t understand and others in English. She saw her own name, and Noah’s, too.

 She grasped at the words she understood before they burned away, fighting against the white-hot pain in her skull as the flames painted everything in red and orange and yellow. The pain had been the worst she’d ever experienced. It was as if her brain had been melting inside her head while a thousand knives stabbed at it repeatedly. It was almost numbing, pushing her to the point of nausea until she began to see stars, and everything went black.

 “You… you blacked out?” Noah echoed, sharing an undecipherable look with Mason via the rearview mirror.

 Everyone minus Salazar was back in Mason’s car, listening as Mary recounted her experience with the ritual so that Noah could catch up to speed with everything. She’d been hesitant to include the part about her brief loss of unconsciousness in her story, knowing very well how worked up Noah tended to get with matters that concerned her safety—and the last thing Mary wanted was for him to say “I told you so”, seeing as that he’d maintained firm reservations about the whole thing since she’d first brought up. However, the moment Mary had exited Salazar’s trailer Noah had blipped over to her in a blink, the look of relief on his face quickly replaced by suspicion and worry. He then commented on how pale she looked, and she knew she couldn’t hide how shaken she was no matter how hard she tried. So the truth it was.

 “Yes,” Mary confirmed, “but it was only for a few moments. Right, Mason?”

 She and Noah both turned to look at him expectantly, and Mary could tell he was instantly uncomfortable with being put on the spot like that. She hoped he could read her gaze: that she didn’t want Noah to know she’d passed out for longer than that, because that’d only make things worse.

 Mason shifted in his seat and exhaled deeply. “I’m not going to lie; it felt like years,” Mason muttered. “But it was only about a minute or two.”

 Noah was silent for a moment, taking in the boy’s words. He continued to stare at Mason intensely, unbeknownst to the mayor’s son who kept his gaze focused on the road that led to Mary’s place.

 Noah finally turned his attention to Mary. “You’re okay though, right? No sense that you’re forgetting or missing something, no lightheadedness, no headaches?”

 Mary shook her head, and instantly Noah’s posture relaxed. “At first I just felt lightheaded and weak from the pain. My head hurt, too. But all of that’s gone now.” It was almost the truth—she still felt faint and her head was throbbing dully, but it was a great improvement from how she’d felt when she first came to in the torturing room.

 “That’s insane,” Noah commented. “How just reading a couple of verses from a book could do that to a person. That’s what the blood elves do in World of Warcraft, you know. It’s magic.”

 Mary rolled her eyes while Mason choked back a laugh, the word “nerd,” riding out of his mouth beneath his breath, masked by a feigned cough.