Selene parks her Jeep just off the side of the dirt road. Vicky slides out of the passenger seat with the burgundy velvet bag full of their supplies, giving the pack a thorough check. They will have to hike the rest of the way, hence why Selene chose to astral project to the mountain the night before. However, they will need to be in their corporeal forms to perform this particular spell.
Selene pulls her phone from her pocket, using the compass and GPS apps to help navigate.
"It should take us at least an hour," she tells Vicky.
"I'm all set here."
"Good."
Selene looks up to the sky, what little she can see through the canopy of trees. The sun had set two hours ago. They should have more than enough time to make it up the mountain and set up before the moon reaches its high point in the sky.
Although she's glad that she listened to Vicky and decided not to look for another location, she remains wary of any signs of danger and wear a talisman of alder wood around her neck.
Damian wakes from his rejuvenating sleep; the soil of his homeland sticking to his naked body. With only a thought, the remainder disappears from his skin and clothing appears in its stead. The weather is somewhat crisp this night but it doesn't bother him. Still he dons a pair of dark blue jeans, boots, a t-shirt, and a sweater.
His goal is clear tonight. He will find the woman who disappeared from the top of the mountain. He will find his lifemate.
Hunger bats at him but he pushes the thought away. His only remaining will is to find her and claim her so that he may once again have control over himself. To feed now, without being anchored to his lifemate's soul is a spell for disaster. With that, he flees the cave that protected him during his rest.
In no time at all he catches the scent of a human wandering the trails along the Carpathian Mountains. Turning into mist, he sneaks up behind his prey only to discover a human man. Hunger gnaws at him. With a quick command he sends the man far from the mountain.
It is then that he catches a different scent. Human but not human. Female. And there are two of them.
A smile spreads across his face, for the first time in centuries. Taking the form of a hawk, Damian follows their scents which lead him to fly up to the top of a mountain, the same mountain he spotted his brown-eyed lifemate.
He's there in minutes. His tracking skills have led him to a clearing with little tree cover. Still in the form of a hawk, he lands on a tree branch with a perfect view of the clearing atop the mountain. Damian spots them then, the two women. He watches them, observes them as the fair-skinned one carves a pentacle into the dirt with a stick. The darker-skinned one retrieves candles from a burgundy sack. Burgundy! He was right after all. One of these women is his lifemate. he wants to move closer, to see which of these women have brown colored eyes, but he refrains.
The fair-skinned one—she looks to be in her early twenties, but it is so hard to tell with human women these days—takes two candles from her companion and they both place a candle at each point of the pentacle. With a flick of the fair one's wrist, the candles are lit with flame.
Sorcery is Damian's first thought. He hasn't heard of the likes since Rhiannon Dragonseeker was stolen away by a mage. It's been a long time since he's seen it first hand, although he cousin, Vikirnoff, is a lifemate to one of Rhiannon's descendants and has retained some of the mage's abilities. He stows that knowledge away for now.
The two women proceed to undress. The hawk's eyes widen as he befalls the sight in front of him. It is almost enough to send him from the tree and to the ground where the women stand naked before the moonlight.
The fair-skinned woman scans their surroundings, turning in Damian's direction as she does so, the moon to her back. He is still too far away to get a good look at her eye color. She seems to find nothing alarming and her posture relaxes. As she turns away again, he notices her pulling a necklace over her head and add it the the pile of clothing.
Neither women seem to notice the chill in the air.
"Just a few minutes, now," the fair-skinned one says to her companion.
"Do you want your robe?" her dark-skinned companion asks.
"You can toss it to me."
Her companion does as requested, retrieving two black lace robes from the burgundy sack, tossing one to her friend and keeping the other for herself. However, they do not don the robes. Instead both women leave them outside the circle of the pentacle.
The moon reaches its high point in the sky, and Damian watches silently, perched in a tree branch, as the women step into the pentacle, take hands and begin chanting. If it wasn't obvious before, it certainly is now. These women are casting a spell.