The Magic Rain
Ch. 23

Chapter Twenty-Three: Aftermath

I watched Jo-Bri physically struggle with Hodon. Actually, Hodon seemed to be offering no resistance; rather, it was Jo-Bri embracing the dark wizard in a huge bear hug. I felt a thought from Jo-Bri and then saw a brilliant flash of light.

"No!" I screamed, and fell to my knees in the dirt on the side of the highway.

Jo-Bri and Hodon were gone.

My father dropped to his knees in the dirt beside me, embracing me as I sobbed. It was like having an organ torn from your body without anesthetic, and I knew exactly what organ it was. Jo-Bri had just torn my heart out.

He was gone. I couldn’t believe it.

"He had to do it," my father said. "Hodon would have destroyed us all."

I shook my head. Part of me knew my father was right, but I’d be damned if I could accept that.

The worst part of it was the final thought that Jo-Bri sent my father and me before he tore open the portal and closed it behind himself. Jo-Bri had told us that he had manipulated the rain of numbers so as to prevent a new portal from ever again opening on this side of our worlds.

Jo-Bri was gone forever.

I began to retch. I couldn’t fathom the loss. Maybe others would look at me as a silly teenaged girl undergoing some type of juvenile puppy love infatuation, but they wouldn’t have understood the depth of the bond we had all formed with each other. Jo-Bri had nearly wanted to commit suicide upon losing Scott, and now I had lost Jo-Bri, my soul mate, my teacher, my lover, my…

"It’s okay," my father kept repeating, knowing that the cadence of his deep voice mouthing that lie might in itself keep me from falling over the edge.

"He’s gone," I said, for no reason, because the mere saying of it accomplished nothing. What was there left to live for?

"To replace him again," my father said, alarmed, and I realized he had been reading my thoughts.

"What?" I said, rocking back and forth in his arms, feeling at once like the little girl I was before meeting Jo-Bri and the grieving full-grown woman I had become because of him.

"You’re a wizard," my father said, holding me at arm’s length now, staring into my tear-filled eyes. "You’ll replace a way."

I frowned. "Witch," I corrected him, "I’m a witch."

My father nodded. "That’s what you have to live for," he added, emphasizing each word with the love and concern of a father for his wounded child.

And then I knew three things with absolute certainty: that I would spend the rest of my life trying to replace a way to either go to Jo-Bri’s world to replace him, or to bring him back into mine; that if I was able to create a new portal to get Jo-Bri back, that Hodon would be able to do the same and thus would loom as a threat to my world for as long as he lived and, finally; that regardless of whether I’d be able to ever open another portal to win back my soul mate, I would have to replace a way to prevent my world from destroying his – or from destroying itself.

"The others," my father said and I quickly stood, and so did he. He pointed and we ran in that direction.

I sensed the battle before we reached it. I felt a moment of dread, thinking of Scott laying dead on the ground, but this time I could feel the presence of all the others – Mike, Debbie, Linda, Maria and my mother, all tense, in action, but alive.

They were several hundred yards from our own battle with Hodon. Two wizards stood facing Mike and the others, and I sensed that the rain of numbers had become a hurricane, winds battling back and forth and swirling around, reality shifting as if it were a feather in a windstorm, twisting this way and that.

I felt my father decide to lend his power to the battle and I mentally stopped him, surprising him, but as quickly as I explained mentally what I intended, I felt his unconditional support, just as I had supported Jo-Bri in his final battle.

The word "final" broke my heart, but I knew that I would not be honoring Jo-Bri by giving up now.

I sent a quick thought to the others who nearly as quickly as my father agreed to support me, and I felt such love for these people who were now so close to me, as if they were just parts of my soul externalized.

I stopped just outside the storm of numbers, turned and faced the wizards, who were too involved in their battle with my friends and loved ones to even notice me.

I closed my eyes, dug deeper than I ever had, and then asked for all the support I could.

I duplicated Jo-Bri’s actions a few minutes earlier. I screamed, focusing all of my energies and the energy lent to me by the others into that scream, directing it at the wizards who faced us. It stunned them just enough to disrupt their attack and defense and into that gap I then focused an even stronger blast – of pure acceptance and love.

My parents were the turning point, digging even deeper than I had to channel every bit of energy they could draw from the atmosphere, from the reality around them, even tapping the energy of the battle itself, pulling from the storm of numbers and giving it all to me.

I wondered if I would survive the act of containing and channeling this much energy in my frail little body, but I knew I would do my best, because Jo-Bri’s sacrifice deserved no less.

The battle stopped. The wizards stood, as if stunned into silence and inaction.

The pause was like the one that had followed Jo-Bri’s channeling of love to Hodon, and I knew how that had eventually turned out, so I quickly asked Maria to probe the wizards.

Maria did so and gasped.

I prepared to resume the battle, but she calmed me.

"You did it," she said, and began to sob, falling to her knees, followed by the others, exhausted from their battle and released from it with a shock that, even if positive, was hard for their depleted hearts and souls to bear: it was over.

Hodon’s wizards slowly knelt on the ground as well and also began sobbing. I glanced at my father, and silently asked him mentally to go to Hodon’s wizards with me.

Without my asking, my mother stood from where she had been kneeling along with the others, and accompanied us across the hundred yards that separated the one group of wizards from the other.

I sensed Hodon’s wizards’ identities as I walked toward them. They were suddenly completely vulnerable to my probe, though it helped that I felt Maria’s support in that probe. I also felt Mike preparing to defend me if necessary and for the umpteenth time sent him and the others a burst of love. And as I did so I realized that they were all my soul mates, as much a part of me as my own body or my own mind.

The taller of the two – though it seemed silly to differentiate between someone who was 8 feet 2 and someone who was 7 feet ten, was named Riot. The shorter was Likud.

They both looked at me as I stopped in front of them, their heads nearly on a level with mine even though they were kneeling. My mother stood on one side of me, my father on the other. I momentarily realized how lucky I was to have these two people as my creators, my protectors and, as with the others, my soul mates. I realized too that Jo-Bri had helped me grow so much that I felt almost as if I were now a different species, so much… larger… than I had been before meeting that boy-man-wizard.

I smiled, but my heart was still breaking.

Likud spoke to me in the old language – Jo-Bri’s language. "Forgive us," he said.

I frowned, in surprise, and then smiled again, intentionally, to put them both at ease. My father and mother both, as if on cue, crouched down and helped the two wizards stand.

Thoughts were so much more encompassing than words, and it took only a few moments for me to understand that these two men, who now towered over us from their 8-foot tall heights, had been forced by Hodon’s pain and fear to follow him and to do horrible things, and that Hodon’s departure back into their world had released them.

I felt a pang of sympathy for them, for they were now stranded in a completely alien world, wrapped in guilt and shame for what they had done under Hodon’s influence.

"But we are free," Riot thought to me, and Likud agreed emphatically. I had felt Hodon’s pain and fear and it had brought me to my knees, so I understood their eagerness to face the harshness of an alien world rather than to continue in their own world under Hodon’s domination.

I turned and glanced around. The forest was rife with signs of battle – brush and trees torn up by the roots, or charred by the energies released here, huge swaths of ground literally exploded upward and then falling back to earth, leaving large mounds of dirt, scars along the ground, and even rocks blasted to pieces.

Somehow, my loved ones, Mike, Debbie, Maria, Linda and my parents had survived, and now we would bring two more into that group – Likud and Riut.

I wrinkled my nose. "Uh, guys?" I thought at them all, "we’re going to have to come up with pronounceable names for these two."

Mike started it – he began laughing. Maria joined next, though her laughter was mixed with crying as well.

I thought I was going to have to tell them all that Jo-Bri was gone, but they had sensed his disappearance.

So we stood there, wizards all, laughing and crying in the charred, scarred, blasted woods, wondering what the hell we did now.

Jo-Bri… where are you, my love?