The Edge of the Light Read Online Free Page B

when there’s a bunch of them, anyway?”
    Diana, sitting in the other chair, smiled. “A murder.”
    â€œA murder of crows?” Becca plopped back down, this time with her gaze on the flames of the gas fire. “I would’ve gone a long time without figuring that one out.”
    â€œShall we start again?”
    And so they did. Back to the blood coursing, back to the breathing, back to the mantra.
    There was nothing else. Absolutely nothing beyond the mantra came into Becca’s mind. After a few minutes, she heard Diana murmur, “Now let it go,” which was the signal to cease the mantra. Still, there was nothing.
    This wasn’t unusual. Diana Kinsale was the only person whosethoughts Becca had never been able to hear in the form of what she’d long ago learned to call whispers. At first, Becca had believed it was because Diana possessed an unearthly ability far beyond her own. But she’d learned it was simply because Diana was able to control her thoughts when she wasn’t speaking, and because her thoughts exactly matched her words when she did speak.
    In this practice that the two of them engaged in, however, Diana allowed her mind to wander, and it was Becca’s job to learn to block Diana’s thoughts without the aid of the AUD box. At first they’d used the mantra to do this. Now they were moving on to the ability to empty the mind first and to lock it off from invasion second.
    Becca breathed deeply and maintained control. The moments passed. Each second ticked off an entire eternity and then,
down
to my soul here Clarence comes
was as loud as the crows had been.
    â€œDamn it!” Becca cried. “This is hopeless. What was it, five seconds?”
    Diana rose. Her warm hand came down on Becca’s shoulder. “What did you hear?”
    â€œ
I
don’t know. Something about my soul and Clarence.”
    â€œThat’s all?”
    â€œIs it another mantra? Not that it matters because it invaded my brain in like . . . I don’t know . . . like I said, five seconds.”
    â€œYou went nearly two minutes if you heard nothing else,” Diana said. “‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes.’”
    â€œYeah. That’s it. I held it off for a while but then . . . there it was.”
    â€œDid you hear more?”
    â€œ
Was
there more?”
    Diana came around to the front of Becca’s chair. She crossed her arms and observed Becca solemnly. “There was indeed. I was thinking the opening soliloquy of
Richard the Third
. It’s two pages long.”
    â€œRichard the who?”
    â€œShakespeare,” Diana said. “A very fine play. You must read it sometime.”
    â€œShakespeare?” Becca groused. “No wonder I couldn’t hold it off.”
    Diana shook her head. “I don’t believe you understand. As I said, the soliloquy is two pages long. You held it off until the last line.”
    â€œSo you were thinking, like, the
whole
soliloquy?”
    â€œFrom the moment you let the mantra go. It might have seemed like five seconds to you, my dear. But the soliloquy—done well—takes more than a minute and closer to two.”
    Becca’s eyes widened as she took this in, along with its implications. Nearly two minutes of holding a mental barrier against the invasion of people’s thoughts? It felt like a miracle to her.

3
    H oly Redeemer Pentecostal Church had no windows. The reason for this was that it had long ago been decided that nothing from the external world should distract the church’s congregants from worship. So the windows that
had
existed in the storefront where services took place every Sunday and Bible study occurred every Wednesday night had been boarded up with plywood. The look at first had suggested a hurricane was imminent, and because of this, a committee with marginal talent had painted scenes from the Old