"Screw them," she whispered aloud. "Screw all of this."
She flung her sunglasses across the room where they landed with a crack on the wooden floor.
She wrung her hands and pressed her face into her knees and sobbed for the loss of the people that she loved. Sydney had been her lifelong comrade and one of the only people in her world that ever truly seemed to understand her. Then Sebastian appeared--that mated soul whom Sydney, somehow inadvertently, had brought into her life. Now they were both gone, their brilliant flames snuffed out by an evil that Abby had not even known existed. Her desperation to find answers suddenly felt pointless and without hope.
Elda had spoken of the witches' burden since Abby first learned of her powers, but she hadn't understood. Those haunted looks that all of the witches seemed to possess, the horrific story of the Lourdes, all foreshadowed that which Abby had refused to recognize. Now she got it, the power, the gift, came with great suffering and she feared that she could not withstand it.
"I don't want this," she cried into the empty room. "I don't want this!"
She slammed her fist onto the wooden floor and a tiny web of cracks appeared beneath her hand.
* * * *
Abby pulled the cork from the bottle of Merlot and poured a heaping portion into a white coffee mug. Sydney and Rod had an entire cupboard of sparkling goblets, but they felt much too festive for Abby's dour mood. She sipped the wine and walked the apartment, silently observing her surroundings.
Elda had told her to shut off her brain and see with her senses.
'Our brains are so efficient," the Elder Witch had explained. 'They create neural pathways to remember things. These pathways are like deep ruts that our thoughts flow through again and again. We stop seeing the tree outside our window and how uniquely beautiful it is every single day. Instead, we see a familiar object and pass it by. We fixate on our lover's flaws because we've trained ourselves to see those patterns rather than acknowledging how gently he's holding the baby or how, today, his eyes are filled with wonder. To see the world through a clean lens, Abby, you must take thought out of the equation. Don't name it or judge it, just see it.'
Abby glanced over pictures, books, artwork and let it merely exist, not allowing any associations or memories to sully the impact.
When she moved into Sydney and Rod's bedroom, she closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the pain of their rumpled sheets and then releasing it.
"There's something here for me," she said to the room. "I can feel that I've been drawn here. Please reveal yourself."
She repeated the words as she walked the perimeter of the room and then into the bathroom. Nothing jumped out, but the hairs on the back of her neck began to tingle. High heels and paperbacks and half smoked cigars, one of Rod's guilty pleasures, slid into focus and then out again. Doorknobs, a wall mural of a Malaysian pool, ceiling fan, wooden floor, black shag rug, ankle weight... She paused, her mind backtracking and she shifted her gaze to the black shag rug. It was small, round and sitting just beyond the foot of the platform bed. Abby had been to the loft several times and she had never seen the rug. On top of the rug stood a small, three-legged table with a mirrored surface. It held two candles, melted nearly to their bases, and a small rock with something etched into the surface. She lifted it close to her face and saw a crudely carved heart. She considered the heart and looked at the rug again, thinking.
She crouched down and slid the table and rug aside and stared at the wooden floor boards. Everything looked right, but something was off. She traced her fingers along the boards and noticed that the grains differed slightly. The variation was barely perceptible, but she began to force her fingernails along the board edges, prying and pushing until one of the boards gave. She lifted and a large square of floor rose up to reveal a trap door.
She sat back on her heels and chewed the end of a fingernail. Rod's body had never been found and the thought of discovering him rotting in the loft floor petrified her. No smell rose from the darkened space.
She took a deep breath and got on her hands and knees, peering into the hole. A wooden ladder led down from the opening. The total drop was no more than five feet and only an empty plank floor greeted her. She could not see what lay beyond the shafts of light illuminating the opening. She grabbed a box of matches and lit one of the melted candles from the table and climbed down.
A secret room existed beneath Sydney and Rod's bedroom. It was rectangular in shape and filled mostly with colored storage totes. Abby had to hunch to keep from hitting her head on the ceiling. A small table stood along one wall and, above it, Abby could see several battery-operated push lights. She clicked three of them and scanned the table. It held a jumble of items from newspaper clippings to keys. She lifted one of the newspapers and gasped at the cover. A picture of a smiling Devin, beneath a headline that read 'Young Trager Artist Found Dead in Ebony Woods,' stared back at her.
"Ebony Woods," she murmured, remembering the name, but not immediately pinpointing where she heard it before. Slowly it dawned on her, the newspaper clipping of Devin's Aunt Aubrey who burned to death in 'the Ebony Woods'.
As Abby studied the dates on the newspaper, her hands began to tremble. The clipping was dated three days after Devin's body had been found. Sydney and Rod had already left for the Cayman Islands.
She spun around, convinced that someone stood behind her, but no one lurked in the shadows. Rattled, she hoisted several boxes out of the hole and closed the trap door.
In the apartment, she set to casting spells over each window and across the door. No spells were absolute, Elda had been clear on that point, but all of them offered some form of protection.
Abby opened Rod's laptop and typed in Sydney1. Rod clearly did not follow safety measures with his electronics. Sydney1 had been his password years earlier when Abby visited. She opened the web browser and searched 'Aubrey Blake witch.' It was the same search that she had performed nearly two months earlier, on the very day that she and Sebastian almost lost their lives.
She found the site History of Magic and clicked it open. The same graphics appeared with stars falling across a black screen and then, pixel by pixel, the image materialized. She saw Aubrey first, her brilliant red hair, black and white in the picture, stuck wildly from her hood. She scanned the other faces. In total, eleven people stood together, their arms linked. Two men flanked Aubrey on her left and right, both grinning beneath their dark hoods. They all stared at the camera with a kind of exuberance that electrified Abby. She laughed in spite of herself and felt their energy travel the distance of time and space to meet her in that modern loft where she sat alone, connecting to them through a computer screen.
She studied each face and when she came to the thin, narrow featured woman who stood four people to Aubrey's left, she grew cold and still. Dafne stared back at her--Dafne of the coven of Ula--not some ancestor, but Dafne herself. Her dark eyes were unmistakable, though different, lighter and filled with joy. She held the same elation as every other witch in the picture and Abby knew that all, but three of them, were witches. She could see an unmistakable aura of glittering light surrounding the witches.
She did not recognize the other faces, and yet she did. She felt the resonance of their bond and, despite the warm room, she shivered and wrapped her arms tightly across her chest.
****
Oliver spent the day in the lake, cutting through the frigid waters between the island and the shore until he grew too exhausted to go on. He stumbled up the sand dune embankment on the north side of the island and fell asleep, his body hot beneath the rising moon.
He awoke to Lydie beside him, gently pooling sand up over his feet, ankles and calves.
"What are you doin,' Lyds?" he asked sleepily, shivering suddenly against the steadily declining temperature.
Lydie wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Oliver wore only his damp swim trunks.
"Heating you up," she said, adding more sand and then starting on his thighs.
> The sand felt good, warm, and Oliver knew that Lydie drew on her element of fire to heat the sand. He let his head fall back to the earth and stared up at the night sky.
"Waning moon," Lydie said, holding her index finger and thumb up to the sliver of moon above them. "Waning witch," she added.
She was recalling an old nursery rhyme that spoke of the witch's power waning and waxing with the moon. It might have been a nursery rhyme, but it was very true for many witches, the women especially. Oliver rarely noticed a decrease in power when the moon waned, but he had witnessed it in Dafne on more than one occasion.
"I have to go after Abby, honey," Oliver told her, sitting up and wrapping an arm around Lydie's tiny back.
She gazed into the dark night and he felt her shudder.
"Hurry," she said.
****
Abby checked her mirror one more time. She wore an oversized black coat with a white hooded sweatshirt underneath. Her hair was tucked beneath her hood and a pair of Sydney's gaudy sunglasses covered most of her face. She did not sense danger in Trager, otherwise she never would have risked a trip to the grocery store, but she was starving and wanted a little human contact, even if it only included telling the cashier to have a nice day.
She wandered the aisles in distraction, filling her basket with granola bars and yogurt. She spotted the fruit and hurried over, already craving the sweet produce that Michigan could no longer deliver roadside as winter approached.
She reached for a pomegranate. Her hand brushed against a woman also reaching for the fruit. Abby pulled back abruptly, as if burned. She blushed, embarrassed by her reaction. The other woman had barely touched her, but Abby had felt a jolt just the same.
She turned to the woman and gave her a wan smile, hoping to diminish any concern that her recoil might have caused. The stranger stared at her with intense curiosity. Her clear gray eyes locked on Abby's and she tucked a strand of her short blonde hair behind her ear. The woman opened her mouth, as if to speak, and then a young girl with red curls tugged on her skirt. She jumped, startled, and gave Abby a quick nod before she walked away, holding the child's hand. The woman dropped the pomegranate into her child's small red cart next to a stuffed, purple kangaroo.
"Fruit of babies?" the little girl asked her mother, touching the pomegranate.
"Symbol of rebirth, honey," she told her daughter.
The woman nuzzled the girl and smoothed the curls back away from her forehead. Before they moved down the next aisle, she turned once more to Abby and gazed at her for several long moments.
Abby waited and then she replaced the pomegranate in her own hand and, abandoning her basket, followed the woman. She walked to the front of the grocery store and stood by the drinking fountain, occasionally dipping her head to take a drink.
She closed her thoughts, as Elda had taught her, and acted on intuition alone. If her brain was allowed control, it would demand that she consider every possibility for the shock that this woman's touch had passed to her. She would get lost in fear and paranoia and, in that moment, she needed only to move, to breathe and to move.
When the little redhead squealed in delight that her mother caved and bought her a candy bar, Abby slipped out the side door and jogged quickly to her car. She slid in and turned the key, watching in her rear view as the woman left the store. She bent over and pushed the little girl in her tiny cart across the lot. The child stood in the cart, clutching the sides, her kangaroo dangling from one armpit. The woman pushed her fast and the child's red curls blew out behind her and they both laughed. They stopped at an older blue pickup and the stranger loaded her daughter into a car seat.
The woman drove across town and then turned onto the same winding forest road that Abby had driven a thousand times on her way to her Aunt Sydney's house. However, when they came to Sydney's driveway, the blue truck passed it by, eventually turning into a narrow dirt drive. Abby passed the drive and then circled back once, looking, but seeing only where the weedy path disappeared into trees. A series of mailboxes marked the drive, which meant multiple houses were located there. Abby parked in Sydney's driveway and returned on foot.
She crouched in the woods and watched. Abby observed several small stone cottages along the rocky Lake Michigan shoreline. The cottages formed a half moon around a large fire pit. . Beach chairs and benches lined the pit, despite the late season. Abby could see a few wine bottles nestled in the sand near the chairs and stacks of wood on each of the cottage's porches. She could not tell which home the woman had entered because the driveway simply formed a grassy roundabout with several cars parked along its perimeter.
Abby remembered the cottages, but only vaguely. She recalled Sydney pointing them out from the boat one summer when they were out trolling in the lake with Harold, Sydney's first husband. Harold had mostly dozed off, his pole unattended, while Sydney steered and Abby hung over the bow searching for fish in the clear water.
"They're ripe with history," Sydney had told an eleven years old Abby, veering the boat closer into shore. Abby remembered the strange group of women she had seen that day. They waded in the water, laughing and talking loud, but they wore long dresses that floated on the surface like blue and orange and red lily pads. Several of them waved to Sydney as they passed and, when Abby asked why they were swimming in their clothes, Sydney had told her 'because during the day they can't go naked.'
Abby stood now, almost waiting to see that same group of colorful ladies, like a bouquet of flowers, fanning out into the frigid autumn waters. But the cottages remained silent and still, other than the tendrils of creamy gray smoke that drifted from two of the chimneys and disappeared into the overcast sky.
Abby looked up, startled when a glob of red curls darted across the yard in her direction. The child had barely left the house and, like a blood-hound, she seemed to know exactly where Abby stood. Abby stalled for only a second and then, pushing off with her right foot, practically ran straight up the tall pine tree in front of her. She paused on a series of thin branches fifteen feet in the air and watched the little girl run into the woods below her, stopping immediately. Abby expected her to look up, but she merely gazed deeper into the tress. She hummed a low haunting melody and Abby watched her, mesmerized.
"Ebony, Ebony, where are you?" her mother's voice rang out and Abby recognized the voice of the woman in the grocery store.
Abby returned to Sydney's house, but did not go in. Sydney knew the people in those stone cottages, but how? Abby needed to speak with someone that knew about Sydney's life in Trager City.
Abby rested her forehead against the wall and groaned. She would have to return to Lansing and talk to her mother.
****
Sebastian sat on Isabelle's couch and sipped his tea, heavy with milk and sugar.
The hospital had been a nightmare, considering the staff were busy with people who actually needed their help and could hardly be bothered with a young, clearly healthy, man who'd forgotten his identity. When Sebastian finally made it into a doctor's office, the physician merely asked him a few questions, probed his head for bumps and said that his memory would likely return in twenty-four hours. The doctor further implied that Sebastian was either a con artist or had consumed too much alcohol the night before and would remember clearly when he slept off his hangover.
He stripped down in Isabelle's bathroom, again searching every inch of his clothing for some identification. He found nothing. He put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that belonged to Isabelle's father. The pants barely reached his shins and the t-shirt hugged too tight around his chest, but stylish clothing was the last thing on his mind.
"I thought I might call around and see about costume parties," Isabelle told him when he returned to her sitting room.
"Costume parties?" he said absently, staring out her window at the small balcony adorned with chimes, ceramic fairies and a single purple lawn chair.
"Yes, your clothes," she trailed off.
He nodded. His c
lothes were extremely strange. They added yet another element to an already exhausting range of possibilities. In a black room, every corner, crevice and wall offered more space to discover, but also to ram your head or knee against.
"I can't thank you enough," he told her, taking her hand and squeezing it.
She squeezed back and smiled, revealing a dimple on her left check.
"I want to help you," she told him seriously.
Chapter Fourteen
August 7, 1908
"He can't be serious," Dafne told Aubrey, shaking her head knowingly. "He's grieving. No one would possibly believe that tale."
Dafne and Aubrey sat side by side on the porch swing that Henry had fashioned from a fallen maple. The western sun shone through the dense forest, mostly empty of its leaves.
"That's what I'm saying to you, Dafne. People are believing it. They're looking at me cross everywhere I go. I didn't sell a single poultice at the market yesterday or the day before..."
"It's a dry spell, that's all." But Dafne felt her pace quicken as she spoke. They no longer lived in a world of witch accusations and terror, but small communities bred paranoia better than most and, though a life might not be taken, a livelihood easily could.
"I wish to believe that," Aubrey whispered, clasping her hands in her skirt and rocking back in the swing. Worry lines creased her forehead and her bright green eyes shone with fear.
"We're the powerful ones," Dafne told her, urgently squeezing her hand. "If anyone owns this town, it's us."
"You're leaving! You and Tobias are as good as gone."
Dafne bit her lip and shook her head.
"Not yet we're not, and we're all in this together. All of us. We'll see everyone Saturday night and then we will know what to do. Surely Celeste can look into the days ahead and put your mind at ease."
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