I felt movement deep inside, like rusty chains unraveling, unoiled hinges creaking, rock cracking. The rain, carrying my spell with it, was seeping down into the core of my being … into a hollowed out cave beneath the sea. Undulating light rippled over painted limestone walls. It was the grotto I’d seen in my vision during the circle. Then, quick as the flash of light, I was in the woods, the windswept heath, the labyrinth at Chartres, and then, barefoot in the grass surrounded by fireflies. The robed woman towered above me and pulled down the moon. I gasped and the woman spun around, moonlight flashing on the silver blade in her hand. I started to turn and run – as I had before – but then I didn’t.

The labyrinth exists outside time, Brock had said. I felt its spirals coiling around me now. I held my ground and looked up into …

My mother’s face.

I gasped at the sight of her, not out of fear, but because she was so beautiful. I had almost forgotten. Black hair framed a white face and pale blue eyes that softened at the sight of me. She knelt in front of me until her face was level with mine and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Callie, what are you doing here? Did you have a bad dream?”

I suddenly remembered this moment. I must have been six or seven. We lived in a house on a college campus somewhere in New England. I’d woken in the night from a nightmare and called for my mother but no one had come. Lights danced over the wall of my bedroom like a swarm of fireflies. I’d heard my mother’s voice coming from the backyard and gone outside to find her, but found instead the frightening woman with the silver knife.

“You were warding me, weren’t you?”

Her eyes grew wide and her hand flinched away from my shoulder. I smelled the fear on her – my own mother looking at me as if I were a monster. Tears fell down my face, so many tears it was as if I stood in the rain. “Was that why you warded me? Because you were afraid of me?”

“Oh, my sweet baby, no!” she cried out, quicker to reassure me than to wonder what stranger had possessed her little girl, but then I saw the understanding dawn in her face.

“You’re Callie grown up, aren’t you?” she asked turning back to me. A tear slid down her face. “You will grow up then.”

“Yes,” I said, “but you …”

I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell her that she wouldn’t be there to watch me.