Dagger Magic

Adam darted after her, preparing to intervene, but he found himself out-of-doors, beneath the dim sweep of a nighttime sky. The grass beneath his feet was flecked here and there with cast-off bits of litter, and gave way to a ribbon of tarmac an arm-span to his left. Houses were visible on the opposite side of the road a quarter of a mile away, their rooftops dimly silhouetted against the amber glow of a distant row of street lamps. Though Adam had not yet been to the scene of Claire's accident in the flesh, somehow he knew it would be exactly as he saw it.

"Now, don't tell me you didn't enjoy yourself tonight!" a woman's voice said in the darkness. "Once the baby arrives, you'll be glad we made the most of these last few opportunities to slip out for the evening."

It was Claire Crawford's voice, both in reality and in his visualization - and he saw that the Claire standing beside him in vision was the same who had appeared in Tom Lennox's photographs, her shorn locks restored, wearing a light-colored cardigan over a denim smock, her body gently rounded by advancing pregnancy. She was smiling, her dark curls bobbing in the breeze, and Adam realized that she was speaking to him in place of her dead husband.

Even as the setting registered, a set of headlamps appeared in the distance and began to converge with frightening speed, flaring like strobe lights. As the glare expanded to encompass them, Adam saw the woman at his side make a sudden lunge, calculated not to carry her out of danger, but to place herself squarely in the path of the onrushing car.

In that same instant Adam was gripped by a sense of genuine peril. Without time to analyze the situation, he yielded to instinct and tried to wrench her back.

"No!" she gasped, head wildly shaking in denial as she fought him. "Let me go! I must see the driver! I must!"

The car was almost upon them. Brakes squealing, it made as if to veer aside. Exerting all his strength, Adam forced her back onto the grassy verge just as the car flashed on by. Its passage raised a gale of wind and grit, and left him with racing pulse and pounding heart.

"Why did you stop me?" Claire demanded hoarsely, aloud as well as in their shared vision. Vision-fists pounded impotently against his shoulders as she rounded on him with blazing eyes and angry tears. "You should have let me seel What happens to me doesn't matter. All I'm trying to do is get close enough to see his facel"

The truth dawned on Adam like a thunderclap. In that instant of revelation, he realized that the scenario into which he had just been pulled had been drawn not from Claire's memory of her original accident, but rather from a follow-up dream born of unfulfilled compulsion - the desperate yearning to identify her husband's killer.

The situation at Carnage Corridor suddenly became crystal clear. Given focus by the longing embodied in her dreams, Claire Crawford was returning on the astral to the scene of the accident, unaware that the cars she was now confronting were real. So convincing was her astral presence, powered as it was by her own emotional turmoil, that the drivers involved were being wholly taken in by the illusion. To avoid hitting her, they were swerving off the road to their deaths.

And had Adam's own intervention a moment earlier perhaps narrowly averted yet another tragedy? Even as he considered that possibility, Claire's voice broke in sharply, high and strained.

"Why did you stop me?" she demanded again. "Don't you understand? Until the driver of that car is caught and punished, my husband and my baby won't be able to rest easy!''

Her fierce accusation conjured a brief but poignant vision of John Crawford laid out in his coffin, the tiny form of his infant daughter cradled in one arm.

"Damn you!" Claire cried, her fingers digging into his arm. "You should have let me see!"

Her sudden fury was like a blast of burning wind. The sheer, undisciplined force of it staggered Adam, and the surrounding dream-landscape shrivelled away like so much burning celluloid, plunging him into sudden darkness.

As good as blind, he raised the focus of his right hand and the ring it wore and cried out the Word of power that was his to command on the astral. His utterance called forth a spark of blue flame from the ring's stone, which expanded and fragmented, sending javelins of sapphire cleaving outward in all directions. Before that light, the darkness fell back, showing him a vaulted tunnel stretching off into murky distances.

Stalactites and stalagmites lined the passageway like ranks of dragon's teeth. The floor was pooled with black wherever their shadows overlapped. Straining his eyes to penetrate the gloom, Adam caught sight of Claire Crawford's fleeing form. Determined to stay with her, he held his ring-hand before him to light the way, and set out after her.