In the early evening, the streets had been slick and lit by reflections of the lights. Now, in the hour before dawn, the streets were deserted, their surface dark and opaque, rimmed with frost and the frozen rumpled remnants of grey slush that had been sprayed outwards by the passage of the cars.
An impassive sentinel moon slipped chill to the end of her night's journey, defining the bare tree branches in silver and black shadow with her retreat.
Gracious older homes, windows dark with wooden railings and porch floors carpeted plush by mounting fragile crystals of frost, pressed close to the street. All were grand old ladies, dark and tightly cloaked against the night.
Betty Sagara pulled her robe more tightly around her thin shoulders. Briskly rubbing her arms she admonished herself, "Betty, you are as foolish as an inexperienced girl, waxing poetic about a cold Ontario night."
Turning away from the window, she sat back in the dark room in an older wing back chair, next to the cast iron fireplace grate. Tendrils of warmth caressed the calves of her legs at the hem of her robe. The fire slumbered, a glowing bed of coals that was ashed over in grey, like the heat of life, banked soft and steady.
The nap of the burgundy velvet on the chair arms under her hands faded from soft plush to the bare weave of the backing, her fingers tracing the shapes worn by years of hands resting in this position. James' hands had rested there, her James. Her heart contracted at the reminder of his loss, she sighed softly at the well remembered pain.
Pain, once cutting, a shard of her broken joy, now had the rounded edges of milky, stream tumbled glass. The passage of the years had allowed her to approach her pain without being cut to the quick. Her thoughts of James were sweet now as time allowed her the comfort of remembrance, of laughter and love.
Her mind called up an image of his smiling face, his eye's alight with laughter. Then another of his ardent face above as his eyes searched hers. She felt again the weight of his body and in memory she heard his ragged whisper, "My love."
She shifted back, aligning her body to the enfolding chair and felt herself sink into a familiar position, one held in memory by the chair's very contours.
James had sat, just so, for hundreds of evenings. She pushed her palms forward along the worn arms and grasped their thread bare ends. Warmth registered in her palms as though she clasped his hands and shining moisture filmed her eyes.
She tilted her head to the side and a tender smile curved her lips, she knew that James waited just beyond the veil. She felt his presence, hovering. She sensed his love and approval wrapped close around her. He waited patiently and vigilantly. He waited for her.
Her remaining friends, as so many were already gone on ahead, indulged her when she spoke of this knowledge. They smiled knowing smiles and she knew that among themselves, they thought her career in occult studies had gotten the better of her. James was long dead, it would have been better for her to have moved on years ago. She smiled ruefully at their short sighted measure of her life.
She knew her colleagues respected her and respected her hard earned expertise; they valued her skills as an educator and they listened raptly to her opinions in their academic discussions. They found in her a resource rich in knowledge and legend. Unknowingly they sought out her ability to perceive pattern in the web of life around her, pattern flowing out forward and backwards from the present. They knew that if you didn't know where else to look, you could always ask Professor Sagara, and she could always point you towards the next step.
But the knowledge of the close proximity of the spirit realm Betty protected. She kept that knowledge safe from her academic colleagues, refusing them access to this secret solace.
Her students, the promising few, were old souls looking out of inexperienced young eyes, or young souls, pure and untrammeled, stretching towards her, drawn by their instinctive attraction to her knowledge.
She knew there would eventually be one or more to whom she would pass this trust before she joined her love. But she could not join him yet. No, not yet. There was still time to be endured.
She shook herself free of her reverie, back to the present moment.
"Betty really," she chided herself "enough!"
She reached across to the side table and, removing the cozy, poured herself another cup of tea. The steam swirled in spirals up off the surface of the hot liquid. Holding the fragile porcelain cup and saucer carefully in one hand she scooted backwards into the warmth of the chair. Drawing her legs up beneath her she composed herself to wait; she knew that it wouldn't be long.
She felt slowly along the tenuous connection of their bond. Henry was there, holding tightly to their link, drawing on her. Along the length of that ribbon she breathed; "Come to me."
He had been shut away from her completely, for the days that he had been missing. Following a flare of intense pain and despair their bond had been broken, gone like the light when a candle is extinguished.
She knew why that was, now. But then, the lack of their connection had been terrifying.
Where are you, Henry?
Then, she had received that chilling visit from a most promising young woman. She'd been dark haired and dark eyed, frantic with worry and babbling.
***
The girl had rushed in while Betty had been preoccupied with the loss of their bond, and was readying herself to leave her office for the evening. Suddenly, Betty had been seized by a vision.
She recognized Coreen as a warp thread in the pattern, as was she. Each of them, a long series of lives running from past to future, upon whose rise and fall of a section of the pattern was developed. Currently, they ran in a parallel course, close to each other on the weave. Betty was aware of all of this in that instant of clear sight.
The girl had been pouring out her story at a tremendous speed and it was rolling past Betty's ears until a single name jumped out…Henry… and she felt hollow panic at her lost bond.
"Slow down" Betty commanded, "What has this got to do with Henry?"
She felt the desperation rolling off the girl, felt her tethered ancient soul sending out a nearly audible entreaty for aid, and the girl herself with no idea of how or why her spirit was reaching out. Help me… help me to help him.
As the jumbled story emerged Betty reached out again blindly for that silvery thread of connection, and found nothing. Urgently she called to him, "where are you?" "Come to me."
***
Now as the night faded, she knew why he had been closed to her, kept from her in a place where she could not come.
He had been taken from his course. His body had been tortured, starved and broken. His spirit ravaged by one who wore the cloth of the very faith that sustained him.
Her gorge rose at the thought and she tasted sour bile. Was there nothing more she could have done?
She sipped tea and with a trembling hand and lowered the cup and saucer to her lap.
She knew they had rescued him.
Coreen had received a call from Victoria Nelson to say that Henry was safe, but Betty had already felt it in the bond that had shimmered back into being, a tenuous thing, slender and with a firmly closed door at the end, but existent once again.
The girl was gone and Betty had returned to her own home to wait.
The last of the night was waning as she raised her eyes from the fire to an apparition.
He stood, half naked and shivering in the middle of her living room floor. Remnants of clothing hung in tatters from his neck and waist. A grotesque leather strap was locked around his left wrist with a short length of chain dangling. In the half light pale skin glowed unblemished but for dark smears at brow, shoulders and heart. A faint shudder racked his frame.
Chin to chest and eyes down cast, a sweep of dark lashes against a glistening cheek, his tousled curls tumbling the fragrance of the frost into the room.
His hands upturned in supplication, he swayed on his feet, and then, gathering his courage raised his face to hers.
Her eyes locked on the black and bottomless gaze of this young and ancient being.
Here was the broken thread, randomly woven in and out of the fabric without regard to the pattern.
The tip of his tongue extended to pass over his lower lip. The sharp points of his fangs drew his lip in slightly, calling to mind, of all things, the image of the nervous schoolboy biting his lip in advance of speaking.
She sensed James' hands on her shoulders, a slight squeeze for memory and for courage.
She watched those dark eyes refocus on a point somewhere behind her. His head cocked to one side, and he nodded once, slowly, as if in acknowledgment.
When his gaze returned to hers, something shifted in its bottomless depths and then rose swiftly like bubbles to the water's surface. He had not moved but the force of his need surged along the bond between them. For an instant she blanched, his need was so great that it abraded her very soul. She raised her chin slightly.
He trembled before her, fearful of rejection yet his need required he give voice to the plea.
"Sanctuary?"