"Now, you drink while I drive," Victor chuckled.
He gunned the car in reverse and spun around. They tore away from the winding trail that led to Lake Superior. She glimpsed the lake in the rearview mirror as Victor hit the care brakes and the shoreline lit up red and barren behind them.
****
"What's your edge, Abby?" Victor whispered, extending his body another inch over the side of the cliff.
The waterfall rushed beneath them. The water was black, oily and familiar. She remembered the taste, the copper salty flavor like blood. Overhead the moon spooked the shadows and made Victor's teeth glow a vampiric white. A million stars watched, the eyes of the cosmos causing Abby to shiver with delight and fear.
They stood over the Vepar's lair as if on a midnight dare. They might have been high school friends taunting the other to run the light, take the shot...do it, whatever it was. A rock slid away beneath Victor and Abby jumped, startled. Her mind and body were at odds. Goosebumps and trembling flesh told her that fight or flight was at hand. Her spirit, however, drew great heaping gulps from the waterfall below and surged enormous and ready to deal justice to the enemy beneath them.
Abby laughed, scared, but so much more than that. A feeling of aliveness pulsed through her body. She felt alive like no other moment since becoming a witch, alive in a way that reading and casting and conjuring could not imitate. The pain of Sebastian's death lived on another planet, maybe in another galaxy, and she let it stay there.
She held her palms down over the water and she willed it, demanded it to stop. The flow rushed on, but then the water slowed, trickled and dried. The night grew silent beneath the water's absence, but Abby felt the water within her. It surged up and up, waiting for her to cast it out, to channel the energy building.
Victor did not wait, but plummeted over the ledge, his hands claw-like as he climbed the rock surface and swung into the mouth of the cave.
Abby hesitated. She looked at the flowing river beyond and she remembered escaping from the tunnels below her. She remembered plunging the rock into the Vepar Antonio. The squeals of agony and black blood filled her brain like a tumor exploding and then Victor called her name and she plunged after him. She moved down the rock face slowly, planting each foot and hand, searching for the widest ledge and the sharpest outcroppings.
When she reached the tunnel, she nearly slipped on the overhang and Victor did not reach out to help her. He was tap dancing on the remaining pools of water, his eyes shining with moonlight and mischief.
"It's now or never, beautiful." He grinned and heaved her up by the arm.
She cast a final glance at the night sky and together they descended into the darkness.
****
Sebastian rolled onto his back and yawned, stretching his fingers overhead where they brushed an empty trough, the sides dried and rough with dirt. He had slept deeply, much to his surprise, and thanked the gods for his fortune that the shed sat atop a root cellar, full to bursting with jars of pickles, fruit, jams and relishes. He had eaten two jars of peaches and half a jar of pickles before falling into a heap on the ground.
He listened for the sounds of others, but his ears caught nothing beyond his breath and the occasional groans of the shed walls.
Before leaving, he peeked through grimy windows at the field beyond. He saw a tall, dark farmhouse in the distance, flanked by a gnarled orchard. The leaves had fallen and mostly blown away and the house looked empty, possibly abandoned. He had sensed that the jarred food had been in the cellar for years and that perhaps no one saw to the shed on any regular basis. The door hinges were rusted and cried out when he first pushed them in, and everything in the shed, from workbench to rafters, was covered in a light gray dust.
He moved deliberately to a small patch of bushes growing wild in the yard. He stood, waited, and then advanced toward the house. He feigned confidence in case someone did reside there. He would merely pretend that he searched for his missing dog.
He neared the back porch where white paint peeled to gray and noted the boards crisscrossing the backdoor. Two windows revealed broken panes of glass and the overgrowth of weeds confirmed his suspicions that the house stood vacant. Several cars, dead-looking, lazed in the tall grass beside the house. He walked to each, peering through windows at cracked leather seats. They were small cars, European, with steering wheels on the right side. He knew a thing or two about hot-wiring, especially the older cars. His father's best friend had been a mechanic who insisted that Sebastian, as a young man, learn the basics--oil changes, flat tires and hot wiring. He did not feel hopeful, though, as he stared at the clunkers before him. In either direction, the road stretched in an endless line of open fields backed by dense forests. He might walk for miles before he encountered a sign of life, and then what?
He felt a surge of hope at the mere thought of getting behind the wheel. Total helplessness could be remedied by a car. Driving had been important in his life before the coven of Ula. He drove to help Claire get over their parents' death. He drove to clear his mind and to find peace when it all became too much. At Ula, so many of his little cure-alls had dissipated. Gone were his long drives and hours in the kitchen behind a hot stove. His only reprieve had been the coven's library and their extensive collection of books. At Ula, he found material that he had longed for after Claire's death. He had absorbed much, but now, as he stood with his hands on the rusted hood of a four-door Renault, his brain felt void of knowledge. So focused on learning to kill Vepars, he'd all but forgotten what it felt like to survive in the human world.
He found the passenger door unlocked and slid into the musty interior, cringing at the pair of molded fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Sebastian surveyed the car's contents. He noticed cardboard boxes filled with records, a couple of bags of musty clothes and pair of old tennis shoes. He fumbled along the visors and beneath the seats, hopeful.
In the glovebox, he discovered a small tool kit and figured that he could at least attempt to start the car with a screwdriver. He pulled the screwdriver out along with a box of matches and, to his delight, he spotted a set of keys tucked snugly between a box of band aids and a roll of duck tape.
"Come on, baby." He immediately started to smooth-talk her as he slipped the key in and turned. Nothing.
****
Victor trotted through the dark tunnels, sliding in the pools of water and casting his dark, twinkling eyes back at her whenever the gap between them started to grow. As they moved deeper into the rock, Abby's cavalier feelings shifted and she found breath harder and harder to come by. The passages narrowed and, when her head nearly scraped the ceiling and Victor had to duck to go on, she laid a hand on the wall beside her and stopped. It felt slimy and wet and she started to recoil and pull her hand away, but then left it. The wall beat a steady thrum of pulses into her hand and with those pulses came flashes of sight.
Victor turned, puzzled.
"What is it?" he asked, returning to where she stood and placing his own hand on the slick wall.
Abby expected him to feel it too, but his face remained perplexed.
"Don't you feel it?" she asked, closing her eyes because she wanted to catch the images as they passed. The water was speaking to her.
At first they came so briefly, she barely saw anything, but then...a flash of blond hair followed by a howling and writhing body on the ground, blood pouring from a wound in the side of its head. Not a Vepar she saw, but a man, his face glistening with sweat, his hands pressed into his temples. The hair again and then a face...Vesta. Then the vision changed and she watched the tunnels as they emptied, Vepars with bloody mouths and heavy feet barreling up out of the earth on a black, moonless night. The dungeons below lay deserted except for...traps. Traps everywhere, spells of evil made stronger through human sacrifice. The room that Toni died in held thousands of black slithering snakes, the poison in their gums filled with the venom of Vepars.
Abby pulled her hand away and teetered on her fee
t, nearly falling as she attempted to see in the dark passage. Victor caught her, holding her shoulders in his hands and steadying her.
"What did you see?"
"We have to leave here." She choked it out, her throat and mouth bone dry.
She heard his own breathing becoming thinner, whistling through his nose.
"The air," he said. "My power..."
Victor was an air element and, as the air in the cave lessened and grew thicker with...something--Abby didn't know what, only that it smelled noxious and felt thick like gasoline fumes--the color drained from his face.
He shook his head slowly from side to side, and then stumbled into the wall, his eyes starting to bulge.
I can breathe because of the water, she suddenly realized.
Victor started to claw at his shirt and then fell to his knees.
Deep below them, Abby heard an explosion.
****
Dafne hurried through side door of the warehouse and locked it securely behind her. The coven had owned the warehouse for decades and, over time, it had slowly filled. In addition to Oliver's jeep, there were two black sedans rarely used by the elder witches of Ula. Abby's Cavalier occupied a corner next to Dafne's green Eclipse. There were boxes stuffed with clothes, books and memorabilia. Tall shelves held picture albums, television sets, appliances and toys. Every witch who entered the coven eventually abandoned their stuff to the warehouse.
The warehouse stood in an isolated stretch of forest at the edge of Brimley, a small community bordering Lake Superior. The coven owned ten acres and the warehouse was tucked deep into the trees and surrounded by barbed wire fencing, which merely served as a deterrent. The repulsion spells truly kept the humans away.
Dafne had left Ula hours earlier, unable to witness the unraveling of Abby for fear that Faustine or Elda would sense her involvement. She moved to the back of the warehouse and then took the metal stairs two at a time. Her stuff occupied a shadowy upstairs corner, far away from the other witches' belongings. Dafne grabbed a familiar black tote and pulled it across the floor. She hesitated and listened, once more checking that no one had followed her. Satisfied, she began the arduous process of ripping off layers of the duck tape that criss-crossed the container. She dropped it in sticky bundles and peeled back the lid, lifting out a heavy metal safe that she quickly dialed the combo into, despite having not opened it in more than thirty years.
Inside a jumble of photos and papers greeted her. Not the fodder of most safes--no cash or expensive family heirlooms lay within the metal chamber, though there was one piece of jewelry, a small copper band with a reddish agate stone resting in its center. She lifted it out and slipped it onto her ring finger where it still fit perfectly. The pictures were not many, but only a glance and Dafne felt a hundred years vanish. Her hands began to shake as she touched the worn photos and her heartbeat grew so thunderous, she thought it might burst and end her suffering once and for all.
His eyes were the same piercing black but, back then, in the days before the darkness claimed him, they had a luminous sheen. They shone with brilliance so intense that sometimes when they walked together in the sun, she could hardly look at him. He wore his hair long back then, held in place with a piece of soft leather at the base of his neck. She remembered brushing it, how the black silky strands flowed over her fingers like water. He worked on the water, a fisherman, and he always smelled of the dank scent of fish skins and seaweed. She would file the sand from beneath his fingers and they would eat fresh salmon, caught just that day, over a fire on the beach.
In those days, she wasn't allowed to date really. Her minister father and prudish mother made clear to her at a young age what loose women did, which, of course, made her nighttime trysts all the more exhilarating. Dafne had known then that his appeal had nothing to do with rebellion. She loved him. She loved him from the first moment that he spoke, approaching her at the market in search of thread and needle for his trousers, which he'd snagged on a fishing hook the day before.
He courted her, in the days after their first meeting, like the best lovers do. He brought her daisies from the woods and seashells from his fishing nets. He waited weeks to kiss her and even then, he planned it as if it were their first time making love. He lit candles and brought moonshine to his friend's little stone cottage. They cuddled by the fireplace and talked for hours and, when he finally tilted her face to meet his, she let go of everything that she'd kept for herself. Every wall she'd built between them, every secret she harbored, every defense that might have kept her at bay went like smoke in the chimney dancing into the dense night air.
After that, the little cabin became their weekend retreat. 'Nannying the newborn twins across town,' she told her family when she raced from home at dusk. They made love on the thin cot beneath the windows, always open to the lake air. They also began to dream. They dreamed of leaving Trager and finding a big city somewhere. She would sell perfumes and oils and he would fish in the ocean, where real money could be made. They would send their families postcards of the exotic foods they ate and the languages spoken by their immigrant neighbors. New York was the place that they both held in their mind's eye, but they rarely uttered the name of the city. It was too real then and, tucked into the little cabin, their dreams still had wings. Neither of them felt ready to ground the fantasy.
Dafne rotated the ring and looked at the agate stone. It had dulled over the years, but still revealed tiny waves of red and white. 'Lover's ocean' he had called it when he first gave it to her. He said that he had walked the beaches for days finding the perfect one. She imagined him sitting on the boat, polishing and filing the fine stone until it was a tiny round orb that he could fasten to the copper band. He bought the copper from her dear friend Aubrey, and Dafne had been happy then that her closest friend knew of Tobias's proposal. They had all been happy then, before the fire.
Chapter Ten
August 5, 1908
Aubrey heard the cries in her sleep and when she woke to the silent room, she felt her blood pulsing in her ears. Nothing rustled. The wind had died early that day and not even her curtains shifted in the midnight calm. She closed her eyes and went beyond her ears, probing for the sound that she knew roused her. It came then, a boy's cry, too meek to be audible, but Aubrey felt his anguish tremble through her. She hurried from her bed, threw on a shawl and sandals and ran into the forest.
The trees around her home blocked the light of the moon, but Aubrey did not need to see the forest with her eyes. She moved swiftly around fallen trees and pockets of thorny bushes until the cries became more urgent and loud enough that her ears picked up the sound. She found him in a small clearing, his hands clutching his head and his small body tucked, as if in his mother's womb, on the leafy earth.
"Solomon, Solomon" she whispered the boy's name calmly as she tried to gently pull his hands from his head.
Solomon was the youngest child and only son of her closest neighbor, Jonas Herman. He lived just a half mile down the wooded track that ran to her cottage in the woods. The only boy amongst four sisters, Solomon knew an adventurous spirit and Aubrey often encountered him leaping through the woods in chase of some small rabbit or squirrel. He did not harm the animals, but merely watched and tracked them. He once told her that someday he would farm the land, but instead of chickens, he would raise coyotes.
He looked at her now with a terror that made her blood grow cold. She lifted him into her lap easily, no longer surprised by her unnatural strength. She carried him cradled in her arms and, when they reached her cottage, she laid him in her own bed and covered him with a heavy wool blanket. He shivered despite the fever and his glassy eyes peered out from his sunken face.
She fumbled through her herbs, commanding her trembling hands to steady and quickly mixed a poultice of arrow root, basil and caraway seed. She removed his blanket and rubbed his chest and neck first with warm sesame oil and then began to move the poultice across his skin. He writhed beneath the mixture, his face gr
owing taut as his mouth yawned in a silent scream and Aubrey thought she saw a darkness too great in his gaping mouth to be merely the cavity for his teeth and tongue. He started to rock back and forth, his movements growing violent, and she had to lie upon him to keep him from leaping from the bed.
For an instant, her vision traveled elsewhere and she saw her beloved Henry picking his way through the woods, his heavy boots getting caught in roots and branches. He stumbled and fell on one knee and laughed at his own clumsiness. Henry, not a witch and a rather klutzy human at that, did not have Aubrey's night vision nor her uncanny ability to navigate the Ebony woods with her eyes closed. He'd been gone for two days to Cadillac, a small lumbering town south of Trager where his brother worked as a doctor. Henry assisted his brother in the hospital and in return, his brother gave him free medical supplies for the small clinic that Aubrey and Henry had opened just six months before.
In her mind, Aubrey could see Henry's leather bag nearly bursting and so she ran from the cottage. She did not call his name, for hearing her would only cause him to move faster and he would likely take a more painful spill. He felt her though and so hurried anyway, moving in the direction of her frantic energy.
For three hours, they nursed the boy. Aubrey whispered incantations and commanded Henry to the mortar and pestle where he crushed and mixed until his hands were nearly numb. He had dumped his bag of medical supplies on the floor, but none of the medicine could remove the slithering dark that had entered young Solomon. At dawn another of their coven, Celeste, arrived and then Dafne and five more witches joined their cause. They linked hands and prayed around the boy, calling upon the energies of the earth and rocking from side to side as he too rocked with the power of the monster within him.
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