Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(51)
The store was emptying out for that slow gap between afternoon shoppers and the start of the evening classes. No one was looking at her.
She took a breath and then leaned her own ear against the door.
CHAPTER 47
The Chrysalis Room
6:22 P.M.
“Listen to the sound of my voice,” said Sunlight.
Dana sat cross-legged on the floor, hands layered one atop the other in her lap, eyes almost closed. The session started gently. They drank a cup of herbal tea as Sunlight explained the process he used to help his students tap into their inner selves and allow their psychic qualities to manifest without conscious interference.
“We all want to be who we truly are,” he said as he positioned candles in a circle around them. Some of the candles gave off a harsher smell than the first batch he’d lit, and he explained that perfumes were used for commercial candles, but for doing difficult psychic work, other elements had to be added to the experience. He lit several sticks of incense, and again the scent was complicated, almost challenging, because it wasn’t actually pleasant, though not offensive, either.
When she asked if the incense was for sale in the store, he made a face. “Corinda, bless her well-intentioned heart, sells a lot of what can best be described as ‘tourist incense.’ Same for most of the candles she sells. They’re very popular with the crowd that orbits the real world of the expanding mind, but they aren’t much different from the dream catchers and kachina dolls people buy for their homes. The unenlightened think that just by having those items it means they are doing the actual work necessary to move from the still-point of spiritual inaction to the place where the soul runs free. Do you understand that, Dana?”
“I think so.”
“No. Do you understand it or not?”
She smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I do.”
“And there we go. Baby steps become steadier, and then you’ll leap into the air and dance.”
Dana wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, but she chose to take it as one.
“As for this incense,” added Sunlight, “it’s not for sale, but I’ll give you some.”
Once the room was set the way Sunlight wanted it, they spent ten minutes together just breathing in the incense, sipping the herbal tea, and relaxing. After long minutes of agreeable quiet, he began speaking, guiding her deeper into the meditation.
“Your body is a vehicle for great power,” he said. “As you relax, as you breathe, you will feel your body change. The density that confines you into your physical shape will become less and less and less … until it no longer has the power to trap your spirit. And then, with a breath, you will rise up and out.”
She inhaled and exhaled, soft and long and easy, feeling the strange smoke soothe her and sand the edges off her anxiety.
“Nothing can hurt you here,” Sunlight told her. “You are safe. You are powerful. You are in your power and of your power. You are powerful in so many wonderful ways. Say it, Dana, decree it. You are powerful.”
“I am powerful,” she murmured.
“You are safe.”
“I am … safe.” There was the slightest stumble over that, but she repeated it. “I am safe.”
“You are safe,” echoed Sunlight. “You are like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. The form and nature that defined your life until now disguises the form that you will become.”
The room seemed to swirl with the incense smoke, tilting and turning in ways that she found relaxing rather than unsettling.
“Let your spirit rise and expand, Dana,” said Sunlight.
When she’d started coming to Beyond Beyond with Melissa, this sort of thing would have made her laugh, or at the very least feel incredibly self-conscious. But the visions and the deaths, and the horrors in Frank Hale’s sheriff’s department files, changed something in her. The new age stuff no longer felt like some kind of benign pretend magic. This wasn’t healing crystals, faerie pocket charms, or chant music. This felt real.
As Sunlight spoke, Dana could actually feel herself changing in some deep and fundamental way. It was as if her body was a box wrapped with chains and locks and metal bands, and with every moment those locks were clicking open, the chains breaking and falling away, the bands snapping. She took a deeper breath, and there was a snap, as if a tether holding her inside her body broke, and then Dana moved upward, drifting like a helium balloon. It was soft, without pain. Without hesitation, either. It felt right. It felt more right than anything else she had ever done.
She could feel her body as two separate things. There was the physical form sitting there, slightly slumped as if muscle and bone, blood and skin slumbered. It was her shell, her cocoon, but it was not who she was. Dana understood that now. Her true self emerged like a butterfly from that shell, rose above it as intangible as smoke but with definite form. She could still feel her arms and hands, legs and feet, heart and breath and everything, except it all felt light, ghostlike, charged with a strange energy that hummed like electricity.
“Open the eyes of your soul,” said Sunlight, and now his voice sounded like it came from the heavens above, deep and soft as thunder from a distant storm. Powerful but in no way threatening. “Open your third eye and allow it to see the truth about what is and what will be.”