When she catches me doing knee push-ups, she pauses the video. “Doesn’t it hurt? Is your left arm strong enough to withstand it?”
“I go easy,” I say, pointing at myself on her screen. “See, I’m doing knee push-ups. There’s a lot less load on my arms than if I was pushing on my toes. Which I can’t do for now, anyway.”
She continues playing the video. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t worry.”
We watch more of nothing happening on the time-lapse video.
“It would be a shame if you rebroke a bone that hasn’t fully mended yet,” Stella remarks without taking her eyes off the screen.
“I promise I’ll be careful, Mom!”
Her eyes dart to me, and she giggles, sounding so innocent and young that I feel even guiltier about my recent fantasies. They were completely inappropriate, just by virtue of our circumstances, even without factoring in our age gap. But hearing her silvery laughter makes me feel like a dirty old sleaze bag.
Am I judging myself too harshly?
She’s twenty-two, not sixteen. And she finds me attractive—only a complete idiot wouldn’t notice it. Regardless, Stella is utterly off-limits, more than any woman who ever made me tick. More than Princess Eugenia, who tried to seduce me during my first months as Theodor’s personal attendant. I was able to resist her sophisticated, high-class temptation. I can sure as hell keep my hands off this artless kid! And I will keep calling her a kid to her face, knowing how much she hates it. My goal is not to annoy her. It’s to convince myself.
I look at her while she looks at the screen.
She’s a good person. There isn’t any doubt about it in my mind. I know she doesn’t approve of her parents’ actions. But Yvonne and Jean-Claude love her, and she loves them back. I don’t fully understand why she depends on them so much, though. But she defies them, sneaking in here daily to give me drug-free water, a high-protein snack, and food for the mind. I’m on my fifth paperback. Ironically, I’ve never read as much as I do now.
“There!” Stella lifts her eyes to me. “Stamped Friday night.”
I focus my attention on the screen. All four cult members are in place, dressed in robes and surrounded by flickering candles. Just like the first time, they hold me down and inject me with a psychotropic drug, and then Yvonne fetches her pocket watch and begins the hypnosis.
I watch my eyelids grow heavy. My body becomes limp as my mind succumbs to the combined power of the drug and Yvonne’s chanted instructions. My breathing slows visibly. A few minutes later, I’m gone, lulled into a deep trance.
“Let me guide you into the dreamscape,” Yvonne says to me in the video. “You will see things there, even talk with the Ever Mage. This time, you will tell us what you see as you see it while you’re in the dreamscape. And when you return to consciousness, you will forget everything.”
Candles flicker, casting eerie shadows on the walls. Yvonne, Jean-Claude, Lana, and Bertrand stand in a circle with their hands connected. Yvonne chants some kind of mantra supposed to guide me into the dreamscape.
Can’t Stella see how crazy her folks are?
As if on cue, she turns to me. “I wonder why they need you to commune with their Mage… Because of the mark on your arm?”
“No idea.”
“Why don’t they visit that dreamscape themselves? Why do they need you for that?”
“Who says they haven’t tried?”
She gives me a round-eyed look. “You think they have?”
“I’m sure they have, and they returned without any actionable information.” I rake a hand through my hair. “They’re deluded, Stella. You know that, don’t you? All their mages, dreamscapes, rituals, all that stuff is nothing but malarkey.”
With the notable exception of Princess Felicia’s visions, of course.
They’re different. Not only are they free of new-age gobbledygook, but their uncanny accuracy has allowed Mount Evor to retrieve two of our lost keys to the impenetrable vault. I dare to hope that Theodor’s and Elise’s jumps went better than mine, and that they made that number three. A man can dream.
The nutjobs on Stella’s screen stop chanting.
“Darrel, are you in the dreamscape?” Yvonne asks.
In the video, I nod, with my eyes closed.
“What do you see?” She steps closer to the bed. “Talk to us!”
