American Goth Read Online Free PDF

down at the valley with him and considered what staying halfway across the span would have meant.
    “Are we going there?” she asked, pointing below.
    “You are,” he told her, “if you can.”
    She took a few steps forward, then stopped when she realized he didn’t walk with her and she looked back at him.
    “Go. And if you can enter, remember what you find. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”
    She mentally girded herself and strode forward, down through the waist-high grass that tickled under her hands, down until the ground leveled, the first clearing before the stand of trees, and there…she discovered the wolf pack.
    They were huge, noble-looking animals, perhaps twenty or so, a range of sizes and musculatures, with fur ranging from the purest white to gold to the inkiest velvet black, and they welcomed her among them in gestures, in sendings, told her she was one of them, a familiar friend, if she chose.
    When the cry had risen among them, a joyful cry that called them to chase, the tide rose in her own blood, a heady wilding surge, and, one with her brothers, her sisters, the silken glide of their fur, of skin, of earth and wind and leaves against her, they ran.
    “Now,” Cort said next to her and—

    “Does it always have to be this uncomfortable?” I asked him, my eyes still closed. My head was filled with a wringing nausea that racked through me, while the dull beginning of what felt like a bruise in my lower back spread through my stomach into the top of my thighs.
    He already had crouched beside me, glass of water in hand. “That should ease, eventually,” he said as I set the sword down and took the glass from him. “Do you want to continue or call it a night?” he asked while I sipped.
    I circled one shoulder around and then the other to ease any potential stiffness. The nausea had slipped back to a level I could ignore, and as for the pain that dozed fitfully in my lower back, well, I’d hurt myself worse. “Keep going,” I told him and gave him a small grin. I could handle it.
    “Good,” he said, “this time, bring it with you,” he told me, nodding at the sword in my hands as once again I raised my arms, closed my eyes, and was

    back to the level of Astral she was familiar with, she stood alone in a circle drawn on the grass, and a glow of light was all that stood between her and them. They were shadows, misshapen humans with wolven heads, vultures with human faces, other similarly repulsive beings she didn’t recognize. Membranous wings and skeletal bodies, shapes she’d known previously only in nightmares. They shrieked and cawed at her, called curses and made rending gestures.
    The sword was Light in her hand, glowed so brightly she could barely make out its internal structure through the white blaze. Light. White light. That was the energy she worked with, had been taught to seek.
    “The energy that comes from the Light is pure, undiluted if you will,” Elizabeth had explained, “and the source of energy matters because when you receive it, use it, it filters through your own body, flowing along nerve and muscle channels—and impurities can block those, build within you and cause actual physical harm.”
    In the exercises she ran through with Cort, she’d learned even more. “It is the stuff of pure potential,” he told her as they moved through the same katas and forms they had before, only this time she’d been asked to “carry” the sword through. She had, successfully, and she couldn’t resist the sense of satisfaction that filled her even as she blocked and feinted.
    “It is what makes you and me, the Aethyr and the Astral, the Material manifest…all of it, and all of it perfect,” he said as his weapon hissed in an arc over her head and she countered. “It is not to be used improperly. And here,” he signaled to her that they were to stop sparring for the moment, “here is the first place that you will meet those that would do that. Draw the Circle