The Magic Rain

Chapter Sixteen: No Way of Knowing

We had no way of knowing how long it would take Hodon to break through. It had been three weeks since his wizard had attacked us on the beach. We kept expecting another wizard to appear, perhaps just as deformed, perhaps not.

In the meantime, we worked, harder than I’ve ever worked in my life.

At first we "just" meditated, but even that was trying, because we weren’t learning "just" to meditate, we were learning to access that quiet center of our being that we needed to stabilize ourselves if we were to have a chance against Hodon’s fear.

Everyone somehow seemed to know what had happened between Jo-Bri and me that night by the creek, though no one said anything.

It was soon after that I realized that Mike and Linda, and Scott and Maria had "hooked up," though again none of us said anything.

I felt badly for Debbie, though she seemed not to notice or at least care that she was the "odd man out" among the couples. In fact, she seemed to throw herself into the training with even more fervor than the rest of us, and she was the first one to actually "do" anything.

It was two weeks into the training, and we were once again gathered at the field by the creek.

Jo-Bri stood facing us as we sat in a semi-circle, legs crossed, on the cool grass. He tilted his head slightly, then walked to Debbie, squatting down in front of her, studying her face. She stared back calmly and it occurred to me that she had never been more beautiful – and she had always been extraordinarily pretty.

Jo-Bri opened his hand and revealed a small stone sitting on his palm. He said nothing. Debbie frowned for a moment, then nodded and closed her eyes. We all waited, then the stone slowly rose into the air above Jo-Bri’s palm.

"Open your eyes," Jo-Bri said.

Debbie opened her eyes and the tiny stone fell back into Jo-Bri’s palm.

"Again," Jo-Bri said.

Debbie closed her eyes.

"No," Jo-Bri said. "With your eyes open."

Debbie opened her eyes and looked doubtful. Jo-Bri reached out and gently touched her face.

I realized that at some point in my past I might have felt jealous.

Debbie took a deep breath and forced her full lips into a smile. I smiled too, because I knew what she was doing – she was smiling at the rock. We all waited, and I noticed that we were all smiling now.

The stone rose again, hovering above Jo-Bri’s palm. Then it began to dance – literally, moving in circles and back and forth as if in time to some unheard music. Then it slowly, gently, sat back down on Jo-Bri’s palm. He smiled and leaned forward, kissing her on her forehead.

Jo-Bri then stood up and reached into his pocket. He pulled his hand out and then in several quick motions tossed small rocks to each of us.

I don’t know how exactly, but I’d known exactly what he had been about to do and my hand was coming up to catch "my" stone before he even began tossing it to me.

He stepped back, smiling. I held my hand out, palm up, the stone sitting there. I smiled at it. It lifted off my palm, and I smiled even more broadly as an idea occurred to me. I "stared" the rock up even higher and then off to one side, back toward Jo-Bri.

Jo-Bri raised his hand, palm up, and I placed the stone down on it. He clenched his hand around the stone and his smile widened for me. I wanted to giggle, I felt so giddy, but the calm that I also felt overcame that giddiness.

I glanced around and saw the others levitating their little stones. Then I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Debbie floating at least a foot and a half off the ground. My eyes got wide, and I laughed out loud in joy. She looked down at me with a smile so angelic that it sent a thrill through me.

I didn’t even try to levitate my own body, feeling that I wasn’t ready for that, but I felt pure joy for my friend, and not a whit of jealousy.

From that moment on, we made breakthrough after breakthrough, Debbie always at the forefront, always at least one step ahead of the rest of us, though it didn’t seem as though she were ahead of us but rather that her accomplishments were gifts to us, helping us achieve our own goals even if they were smaller than hers.

Jo-Bri also began homing in on our particular strengths, "reading" us for what we might be most adept at. Soon Mike was practicing creating energy shields to protect us from other wizards’ spells, and it seemed so fitting – Mike was nearly always the first one to want to protect other people. Even when he had run away at the lake, he had first tried to force me to come with him. Only my own stubbornness – my own feelings for Jo-Bri had foiled his frantic attempt to save me.

Scott was "feeling" us with his mind, and that was the weirdest thing of all, because it felt as if something was actually inside our heads, a pressure, like a tickling sensation, and we knew that he could hurt us there, or maybe just influence us. But of course he didn’t.

Debbie seemed adept at just about every kind of "spell," but was especially good at psychokinesis, moving objects with her mind. One day instead of levitating her little rock, she made it disappear while she was levitating herself ten feet off the ground. When we asked her where it had gone, she looked down at us from where she was floating in mid air and, puzzled, said in that sweet voice of hers: "I don’t know." I wanted to hug her. I found out later that we all did.

Linda was able to do some psychokinesis but seemed particularly adept at "feeling" the surroundings, able to tell whenever someone was going to arrive or leave, sensing their energies and the paths they created when moving through the "rain of numbers." She could even predict behavior and events to some extent. She would move her fingers delicately in the air as if reading the numbers like Braille.

Maria had always been a caretaker, always the one who worried about how we were doing, always felt our upset before we did and had a way of soothing us, sometimes with a joke or a kind word, sometimes with a hug, and that ability expressed itself strongly in her magic, so that she could reach out and soothe us and strengthen us.

Then there were my parents. While the rest of us had been showing off our various new skills, like little kids showing off new toys, my parents had been on the periphery. They had levitated their little rocks but had seemingly been able to do nothing else magical. Until one day Jo-Bri had stood in front of them, studying them, and suddenly he spread his arms wide and began speaking in the old language, the language we had learned a little of by now, in order to speak our spells.

Slowly Jo-Bri began glowing, and we all gasped, it was so beautiful. Then I noticed that there was a nearly invisible "tether" or "umbilical cord" joining Jo-Bri to my parents. The brighter Jo-Bri glowed, the brighter the energy tether grew and I realized that somehow my parents were "lending" or "channeling" energy to Jo-Bri. Jo-Bri later explained that as he had stood in front of my parents he had asked them to channel energy to him, and without ever having done so before they had somehow begun channeling energy, apparently from the air around them.

This too was appropriate, because my parents saw themselves not so much as participants in our lives as much as resources for us to draw on, and now their magic was that they could funnel energy to us to help us do our magic.

And then there was little old Melinda. Me. I had been the first to see the rain of numbers. I had also been the first to intimately bond with one of the group – with Jo-Bri himself. Linda, Debbie and Maria used to call me Little Miss United Nations, because I was always helping everyone else to get along, and that was because I saw myself in everyone else, and I saw everyone else in me, so I could identify with most people. And that’s the way it expressed itself in my magic – I could do a little of everything. I could levitate, though not as well as Debbie. I could sense the flow of numbers and the paths that people and events had taken and to some extent would take, though not as well as Linda could. I could reach out and soothe and support the others in the group, I could create fields to protect us from spells, I could channel energy to the rest of the group, though could do none of those things as well as Maria, Mike or my parents could.

But there was one thing I did better than anyone else in the group, and that was connecting to Jo-Bri. I had felt something for him the moment I saw him. Perhaps it had initially been because he was so damned cute, but after we’d made love, it was as if we had opened ourselves up to each other. It was as if my mind and heart had formed a link to his, so that I knew what he was thinking as well as he knew what I was thinking, and could feel him reach out to me throughout the day, touching me with his mind as if he were stroking my cheek with his fingers, or touching my lips with his.

The second attack came 42 days after Jo-Bri had arrived through the portal and made my Datsun disappear.

Jo-Bri sensed the new intruder early in the morning of the Twenty-third day. We were lying together in my bed. My parents had taken both of us aside one day after our first sexual encounter down by the creek and my mother had asked a single question: "Are you okay, Mel?"

I didn’t give her a knee-jerk response, because I had no need to be defensive, so instead I took Jo-Bri’s hand in mine, and stared into his amazing eyes for what seemed like minutes, actually feeling dizzy as he reached out to me with his mind and heart.

"I’m great," I said, and laughed at the tone of my voice and at the overwhelming joy I felt with this man-boy-wizard from another world.

Then Jo-Bri did something that startled us all. He gently took one of my mother’s hands and placed it in one of my father’s. Then Jo-Bri took my mother’s other hand in his, smiling beatifically and closed his eyes, tilting his head back.

I felt my parents become part of our connection and I felt their surprise at the same time I heard them both gasp. I had already become used to this level of intimacy, an intimacy that was to normal intimacy what the universe was to a single planet.

They were overwhelmed and so was I, because suddenly I was sharing that level of intimacy with the people I had always been closest to, except that now I realized just how far apart we had been – how far apart every human being is from any other human being.

I closed my eyes and saw a brilliance that I knew was their unexpressed love finally released, for each other, for me and now for Jo-Bri, someone who’d been a complete stranger a few days before.

It wasn’t as deep an intimacy as Jo-Bri and I had shared down by the early morning creek, but it surpassed any bond my parents and I had ever had – or that they’d ever had with each other.

So Jo-Bri moved from the guest bedroom to mine and my parents had no objections. And on the morning of day 42, Jo-Bri’s eyes snapped open, which caused me to awake as well. I realized that my summer vacation -- the one that had allowed my parents to be part of the magic, fear and courage of our new little community of wannabe magicians, that had allowed us to disguise an alien sorcerer as a nice, normal foreign exchange student -- that vacation and perhaps my entire childhood was over.

Jo-Bri allowed me to "see" what he saw, and I felt the fear in me. He laid a hand on my naked tummy and smiled.

"It’s okay, Melinda."

Whenever anyone else used my full name, I expected a reprimand for having done something wrong, or at least a lecture of some kind. But Jo-Bri had a way of wrapping himself around my name that made me feel warm and wanted.

We rose then, and as we showered we reached out to each other. Then Jo-Bri made love to me in the shower and as he did so he sensed my fear that he was making love to me because this might be the last time we would ever be able to.

He stared down at me as the water cascaded down at us and did something in his mind and I gasped and stepped back out of his embrace, covering myself with my arms and hands.

Jo-Bri had brought the others into the shower with us! Not physically, but mentally and that seemed as least as real as if he had opened the shower door and our friends had physically stepped into the shower with us.

"Not my parents," was all I could say.

He smiled. No," he said, "not your parents. That wouldn’t be appropriate."

I shook my head. I had only once before had sex before meeting Jo-Bri; a fumbling, painful, awkward experience that had left me bitter and afraid. So Jo-Bri had shown me what lovemaking was supposed to be like and I didn’t know if he knew how hard it had been to trust him and how afraid I had been of a repeat of the first time.

"I knew," he said and I gasped. How had I ended up here? Fear suddenly raced through me. Here I was making love to someone I barely knew, in my parents’ house, and he had just invited the neighborhood in to watch – and to experience.

"It’s okay, Mel," I heard, and realized it wasn’t Jo-Bri this time. It was Scott. Oh, great.

"I’m here too," Debbie said and I felt her – her beauty, her childlike innocence…

Jo-Bri kissed my forehead then laughed and shook his head because in kissing me he had immersed his face in the shower stream. He then somehow, without seeming to even try, pulled me back against him.

I could feel him inside me! In front of all the others! I began to panic.

Maria then reached out with her particular soothing magic, and the others joined in to support her.

Slowly I felt my heartbeat slow, and my panic begin to subside. I looked up at Jo-Bri, studying his face, expecting comfort there but instead I saw that he was watching with a slight smile, inside me physically but not with his mind or his heart.

I felt violated. I thought of slapping Jo-Bri or screaming at him, but Maria and the others were mentally comforting me.

I began to sob and I didn’t even have the strength to push Jo-Bri away and out of me, so instead I pulled him even more tightly against and into me, trying to squeeze the real Jo-Bri out of whoever this was who seemed to be so carelessly fucking me.

The others at least weren’t abandoning me and I felt them like warm think blanket embracing me.

I lay my head against Jo-Bri’s thick chest and sobbed, still holding onto him but relaxing my grip. As I let go physically I seemed to give the others more freedom to work their magic and soon I felt more love than upset.

"Shhh, " Jo-Bri said and I quickly looked up to see him staring down at me with the love I had come to expect from him.

"Where were you?" I asked, as he gently moved the wet hair from my face.

He hesitated, before replying. "I might not always be there," he finally said.

I felt like throwing up, and leaned heavily on the others for support though I felt them react as well to Jo-Bri’s statement.

"I need you to be able to support each other even if I’m not there." He smiled and I felt like ripping it right off his face. I was dying here and he was fucking smiling?

"That," he continued, "is why I opened the shower door and let the neighbors in."

He placed his huge hands on either side of my face and looked down at me with those deep, startling eyes. "I love you," he said, and then laughed. "All of you," he added, glancing around as if talking to hidden microphones. Then he looked back down at me.

I suddenly realized that this must be how Jo-Bri felt all the time, feeling other people in his mind and heart, and I almost shook my head except that I didn’t really want to shake the others out of my head – or my heart.

"We need this," I said, realizing the truth, "if we’re going to have a chance against Hodon."

Jo-Bri nodded.

I suddenly wished all the others were there physically so that I could hug them all to me, no matter how wet and naked and exposed I was.

"We’re here," Maria said and I sent her a burst of love in gratitude for the love and comfort she had already given me.

"We’re here," Debbie echoed, followed by each of the others.

I gasped. Jo-Bri had moved and it sent fire through me in a burst of flame, burning with that uniquely pleasurable pain that is lovemaking, except that this was lovemaking squared – no, lovemaking to the power of a thousand.

"Jo-Bri!" I said, panting, trying not to laugh in embarrassment.

The bastard moved again.

"We need this," Debbie said and I felt a peculiar passion to her thought.

"I bet," I said dryly, but didn’t pull away when Jo-Bri moved again. And again.

The pain/pleasure rose higher and higher and I could feel the others there with us, but I was already past the point of no return, even as part of me – the small, old me -- was still embarrassed.

It was like nothing I’d ever felt, not even with Jo-Bri, as if the others magnified the experience. And I could feel their response too, which magnified it even more, like a self-perpetuating loop, each of us climbing higher and higher…