The crimson witch

stomachs.
        Then his gun was gone, and he was grasping thin air.
        They ran by him.
        Kaliglia bleated happily when he saw them.
        “Stop right there!” another cop shouted. “Men!” he ordered. The officers guarding Kaliglia turned and leveled their guns at the two approaching hippies. Then their guns, too, were gone, nothing but the faint trace of ash smears on their hands. Their commanding officer reacted more quickly than the rest and ordered them to grab Jake and Cheryn. They tried, smashing their hands uselessly against the shields.
        Then they were next to Kaliglia, and Cheryn extended the shield to cover all of them. Beyond, the lot was full of police. Sirens were moaning, bells ringing, men shouting excitedly.
        “Some home you have here,” she said.
        He didn't answer. He had thought that her world-line was intolerable, a place where Talenteds ruled supreme and where Commoners cowered before the likes of Lelar, where the laws of nature could be disrupted at the whim of a sadistic esper. But her worldline, in reality, had something that his worldline lacked: wonder. It had a sense of wonder, a sense of fairy beauty that he had been too stupid to appreciate when he had been there. Here, in the 'real' world of Twentieth-Century Earth Before Nuclear War, there were not many dreamers, not many who could appreciate magic and witches, wizards and warlocks and talking dragons. A talking dragon was something to be locked up in a zoo-maybe eventually dissected to satisfy the curiosity of bearded professors, to quench their thirst for facts, facts, facts. An esper was a potential weapon, not a potential healer, not a potential boon to mankind. A pathway into another worldline was a road to better means of destruction, a tool toward world domination. No, Cheryn's world was a better one, no doubt about it. It was a place of adventure for the sake of adventure, a place where a man's wits counted for a great deal, a place where magic was never taken for granted. And, discounting Lelar, a place where Talented used their psionic abilities for good, not evil. He wanted, more than anything, to go back.
        “Some home I have here,” he said, nodding sadly.
        “Then do we go back to my worldline?” she asked.
        “How? I can't walk out and ask for enough PBT to get us back. And we can't make it to the park and find the hole that we dropped out of.”
        “We don't need any of that. I can take us back.”
        “You what?”
        “Can take us back. Something has happened to my Talent. It's larger than ever before. Before, I couldn't have created a shield big enough to shelter all of us. Now I'm doing it without strain. I think I could make a shield to cover the whole city and still have enough power to play games with your police.”
        “It must have something to do with passing between worldlines,” he said.
        “When that 'wind' was tugging on us,” she said. “When we were coming through the gloom. I think it was that wind, though it might have even been the Smoke Ghosts. I felt them fiddling around inside of me.”
        “And you can open a portal for us? Now?”
        “I think so.”
        “Do it, then!”
        And she did. The spot before them turned dark, darker, pitch black. It grew until it was an enormous square directly before them. Slowly, the blackness retreated, and the square was filled with a scene of the Castle Lelar standing before them, manbats drifting about its towers. “Let's go,” she said.
        They moved through it, dropped less than a foot, and were standing in Lelar once again. The portal closed behind them.
        “We must hide quickly before the manbats see us,” Jake said, grabbing her arm.
        “I don't think so.”
        “What do you mean?”
        “I think we're going to walk into the castle and take over.”
        “What are you talking about?”
        “I think, with my new powers, I can handle the king quite easily.”
        “You're crazy.”
        “We'll find out,” she said. “Come on.”
        They moved forward.
        The manbats saw them, sounded the alarm.
        A dense cloud of the demons sprung into the air from the battlements and swept toward them, wings flapping, dark eyes gleaming, claws sprung and ready to slash…

Chapter Eighteen: PSIONIC BATTLE
        
        “So many of them,” Kaliglia moaned.
        The manbats fluttered down