Tempt the Stars

familiar to human eyes. But all that had ended at the door. I guess if you made it this far, you either weren’t supposed to need comforting or weren’t thought to deserve it.
    I wondered which category we fit in as I gazed around, trying to get a grip.
    It was a little hard, since there was nothing to grip
on
. It was like we’d stepped out of a spaceship into a star field, being suddenly confronted by a big, dark space and hundreds, maybe thousands, of versions of the light creature I’d seen on the drag. Some were small and dim, others large and brilliant, but I couldn’t tell if that had to do with power or if some were just closer than others.
    I couldn’t tell much of anything else, either, since I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. There was plenty of light in here, but it didn’t seem to reflect on anything. It was like the space between the stars, limitless and black, just a featureless void.
    And creepy as hell.
    It was also really inconvenient. Not only couldn’t I see Pritkin’s face, or Caleb’s or even Casanova’s despite the fact that he’d been right beside me a second ago, but the utter darkness was playing havoc with my sense of direction. I kept thinking I was about to fall over but couldn’t seem to do that, either. Or maybe I already had. My brain kept sending me weird sensations, like maybe I wasn’t entirely vertical anymore.
    It sort of felt like we were floating, just random spirits washing along on the tide, me, the guys, a bunch of pissed-off demon lords . . 
    “We all float down here
,
”
Caleb muttered, somewhere off to my left, as if he’d heard me. And yes, that’s what I need right now, Caleb, I thought viciously, Stephen freaking King. But, for once, my brain didn’t latch onto the prompt and start torturing me. Maybe because it already had that covered.
    It was so unbelievably quiet. After that initial statement, nothing else was said. I didn’t know if they were waiting for us, if we were supposed to do or say something, but nobody was. Including Pritkin, who had been here before, so presumably knew the drill. So I didn’t, either, but it wasn’t fun.
    I’d read somewhere that the human brain doesn’t do so well when deprived of the usual sources of input. Like when people go into those sound-deadening chambers that cut out normal background noise. It would seem like it should be restful, peaceful even, all that quiet . . 
    But after a few minutes, their input-starved brains start to freak out, because they need that kind of stuff for navigation and balance and to not start imagining monsters in the corners.
    Not that that was an issue here.
    But only because this place didn’t
have
corners.
    No, it just had a crap-load of things that went bump in the night and who didn’t like me much and who ate people anyway and who probably thought they were due some payback after everything Mom had put them through and—
shut up, Cassie.
    Yeah. Yeah, that would be good. Except that when I shut down my mental babble, I started having trouble with the auditory stuff, half-heard whispers and distant, not-found-on-earth sounds. And odd rustlings, like if I could see behind the collective light show, what was there wouldn’t look entirely human. Or, you know, at all.
    And okay, maybe I’d been wrong.
    Maybe dark wasn’t so bad.
    And then it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
    Two things happened at once: my mother popped into the middle of the huge space, shedding a large halo of light around her, and a massive power drain hit, hard enough to send me staggering.
    Not a normal I’m-so-tired drain, like the one I’d been experiencing lately . . . like ever since I visited her. And yeah, maybe I should have put that together before now. But this was worse, and also a lot more literal, as if all that power I hadn’t been able to access for things like shifting and fighting and saving my life had been welling up, like a wall of bright water behind a dam. A dam that had just been breached.
    And oh,
crap
.
    I could almost see it, a sparkling river of power flowing from me to her, curling around her feet in a glistening stream. Or maybe a flood because this was way, way more power than I used for shifting or stopping time or . . . or anything. Way more than I’d ever channeled at once before in my life.
    And that was despite the fact that she wasn’t really here. I could see stars through her on the other side, although she wasn’t a ghost. I knew