by E J Elwin
“Wow,” whispered Hortensia, leaning in to examine the dagger.
“The added bonus of these weapons,” said Jessica, “is that they can’t hurt the witches who wield them. The crystals you see—” she indicated the purple crystal on the dagger and then gestured around at the other weapons, “are cousins of the Cloaking Crystal, under the protective crystals category. That means you’re free to train with these as hard as you want, and you’ll be safe from any injuries.”
“Really?” asked Hortensia in awe.
“Train?” asked Sylvie, with a sly smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Yup,” said Jessica, with an approving smile at their enthusiasm. “Watch.”
She raised the dagger high above her head, then brought it down hard on her other forearm. There was a flash of purple light at the place where the dagger made contact with her flesh, but not a single drop of blood or any other sign of injury.
Sylvie, Hortensia, and I shouted noises of appreciation, while Lizzie merely clutched her chest, looking relieved that Jessica hadn’t just hacked the lower part of her arm off.
“We’ll be loading up with these for the Ceremony tonight,” said Jessica casually, as though talking about a picnic. “Go ahead and look around and pick your weapon of choice. Choose something that speaks to you!” she said dramatically, sounding like a fashionista discussing a coat or a handbag.
The girls and I looked around at the arsenal. Sylvie grinned and twiddled her fingers in front of her as if she were about to reach into a jar of scrumptious candies. My eyes roamed over the many knives and throwing stars and katanas. I stopped in front of a pair of crescent-shaped axes with bright red crystals set into their handles. The day outside was clear and the light in the room hadn’t changed, but it was as if a spotlight had suddenly shone onto these axes…
Arthur… I jumped and looked around. None of the girls seemed to have heard it, and continued to look around at the weapons.
Arthur… I turned slowly back to the crescent-shaped axes and realized that the whispering voice was coming from them. No mouth had appeared on their shiny silver surface and they were completely still, but it was definitely they who were doing the whispering.
Arthur! they whispered more insistently, and I jumped again. I hadn’t realized that when Jessica said ‘choose something that speaks to you’, she had meant that literally. I looked around at Sylvie, who had picked up one of the broadswords and was looking at it like it was the gift she’d always asked for.
“This one is definitely calling out my name,” she said, examining the glimmering purple crystals at the sword’s hilt.
I was relieved that I hadn’t gone crazy, and wasn’t the only one hearing voices from the weaponry. I reached for the axes, which I knew were meant to be used as a pair. They were hung side by side in a slanted way and facing each other, so that the crescent blades formed something of a steel heart. As soon as I put my hands on the cool metal handles, I felt a tingling sensation run up my arms, and a familiarity with the weapons that I couldn’t understand. It was like picking up a pencil or a spoon, and just like with those instruments, I was certain that I knew how to operate these gleaming new axes.
I looked around and saw Hortensia slowly twirling one of the long wooden staffs in her hands, watching its progress in quiet wonder, as though she were hypnotized. It was about seven or eight feet long, made of a dark polished wood, with glistening black crystals set near the ends.
“The quarterstaff,” said Jessica. “Excellent choice. Did you know it gets its name from the way it was crafted back in the sixteenth century? The wood of a tree would be sawn into four pieces, or quarters, to make one. Very fitting for the tetralingual witch of the Sacred Four.”
She winked at Hortensia, who stopped twirling the quarterstaff and smiled. Suddenly, a shining, razor sharp blade burst from the top of the staff. “Whoa!” shouted Hortensia.
“Also doubles as a spear,” said Jessica, grinning.
We all looked around and found Lizzie in a corner of the room, her back to us. I knew that she was extremely put off by any sort of violence, and was the least enthusiastic of us all to be facing a deadly battle against the Brotherhood. I expected her to be nervous or uncomfortable around these weapons, especially after her reaction to Jessica’s demonstration with the dagger.
What I didn’t expect was for her to turn around, cradling a crossbow in her arms like it was a baby, and looking down at it with equal adoration. The blue crystals set into its curving limbs glittered as she held it up to the light and examined it. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “I’ve never held one before, but why do I feel like I have?”
“That’s your weapon,” said Jessica. “I’m partial to knives, myself, and Jasper has a fondness for maces and katanas.”
“Hey Lizzie, watch this!” said Sylvie. She raised her long broadsword, pointed it at herself, and plunged it in toward her stomach. Lizzie shrieked as a burst of purple light gleamed at the place where the blade should have impaled Sylvie. She twirled the sword in her hand and playfully stuck her tongue out at Lizzie, who looked more like her usual self as she clutched her chest with the hand not holding the crossbow. “Come on, give that crossbow a try!”
“I’ll hold off on that for now,” said Lizzie, and the rest of us chuckled.
“Is this where we train?” Sylvie asked Jessica.
“Not really,” said Jessica. “We don’t want to hack one of these brooms in half. But wait ‘til we get to room ten. Bring your weapons with you…”
The four of us looked at each other and eagerly followed Jessica back out into the hall.
“Is it a training room?” asked Sylvie excitedly.
“Sort of,” said Jessica slyly.
I imagined a large gym-like room with punching bags and a boxing ring, and possibly some dummies to practice attacks on. Jessica put her hand on the doorknob and turned to us.
“This,” she said, “is probably the most magic-heavy room in the house. My mom created it when Jasper and I were kids as a safe place for us to learn how to fly. As you might imagine, she wasn’t crazy about us going out into the skies with the Brotherhood and a world of helicopters and cameras out there. She created a large enough space in here for flying and for safety nets in case we fell, but one day, Jasper decided he wanted the room to do more. With our mom’s encouragement, he started working on expanding the room’s capabilities beyond just getting bigger. He was making great headway, working some really impressive magic, but he wasn’t entirely finished when she died.
“He left the room unfinished for a few months before he finally set to work again. One day, he came to me in the Rose Room and said that he was finished, that he had created something truly exceptional. And this is what he showed me when he opened the door…”
She pushed open the door and led us inside. The room was pitch black. I wondered if I should look around for a light switch, but then my eyes adjusted, and I realized the room wasn’t completely dark. There was very soft light overhead, but it wasn’t from a lightbulb or from the sunlight that had lit the other rooms. I blinked several times and saw that the light was made up of many small lights, tiny little white ones… then my jaw dropped as I realized what it was— starlight. I was looking up at the millions and millions of stars of a real night sky.
I looked down and saw grass beneath my feet, then looked all around to see that we were no longer in Jessica and Jasper’s house, but outdoors in a wide grassy meadow, softly lit by the stars overhead. The grassy landscape sprawled out in front of us, curving into gentle slopes, with no buildings or mountains or anything else blemishing the open horizon in the distance.
I found the girls in the dim light and saw that they were all as awestruck as I was, gaping open-mouthed at the sky and the meadow around us. The door we entered through was nowhere to be found. We had completely left the house and entered this beautiful endless meadow whose location I couldn’t identify. It was certainly nowhere in Oregon I had eve
r seen.
“This,” said Jessica, “is the Illusion Room.”
“This is an illusion?” asked Sylvie.
“Yup,” said Jessica. “Although, it is based on a real place. Jasper really wasn’t kidding when he said he’d created something exceptional. Shortly after our mom died, he went on a trip alone across Europe. What you see before you is something he actually saw while there. It’s a real meadow in the Irish countryside where he went stargazing one night.”
“It’s unbelievable,” breathed Hortensia.
“Amazing,” whispered Lizzie.
“So we’re still in the house?” I asked, stunned.
“We sure are,” said Jessica. “The place where you were just standing, the Combat Cave, to use Sylvie’s term, is only about twelve feet to your right…”
The girls and I looked to our right but saw only more grassy starlit meadow. This truly was, as Jessica said, the most magic-heavy room in the house, and one of the most extraordinary things I had ever seen, second only to Connor rising from the grave. Then I remembered the wonders of the Halfway Place, the great ocean surrounding the replica of McFadden’s Irish Pub, and it occurred to me that I had now seen quite a few extraordinary things…
“Well, this isn’t a bad place to train,” said Sylvie, raising her sword, its purple crystals shimmering in the starlight.
“You could do it here, if you wanted,” said Jessica. “Or…” She put her hands out to her sides, palms up, the way I was now accustomed to seeing her and Harriet do when they activated their gifts, “…in Tokyo.”
The stars vanished and the sky suddenly brightened into daytime. The endless grassy meadow faded away to be instantly replaced by towering buildings all around us. The girls and I shouted our surprise as we now found ourselves in the middle of a bustling city street in Japan.
Cars whizzed by in the streets and pedestrians passed us on the sidewalk. I hurried to step out of the way as a group of business men in suits came toward us, but before I could manage it, they had walked right into me. No, not into me— through me, and through the three girls as well, who watched the men walk away and then looked down at their bodies as though to check that everything was intact. I hadn’t felt a thing, and wondered if Hortensia’s power of becoming incorporeal had somehow spread to the rest of us, before I remembered that those business men hadn’t really been there.
“It’s part of the illusion,” said Jessica. “I know they look real, but they aren’t really here and you aren’t really there. This is also from Jasper’s memories. He went to Japan after Europe.”
The scene shifted again, but the buildings around us remained the same, and only the sky changed, going from a bright early afternoon to a dark clear night. The light now came from the thousands of flashing city lights that had come alive for the evening. The neon signs of storefronts and restaurants flickered all around us, and the many head and tail lights of the cars in the road twinkled and flashed as they moved through the traffic of what was likely a Friday or Saturday night. Two young women made up for a night out exited a taxi cab that had stopped at the curb, then walked right through me on their way to a nightspot nearby, locked arm in arm and giggling at a shared joke.
“Let’s take a walk,” said Jessica. She stepped off the curb and into the busy street. I reflexively wanted to shout at her to move out of the way of oncoming vehicles, but they zoomed right through her as if she were a ghost or hologram, and so I followed the girls onto the road.
It was the strangest sensation to be standing in the middle of the street, and to see a car speeding right at me and expecting to be flattened into bloody bits, only to watch it smoothly pass through my body as if I were a wisp of smoke. Hortensia, who had some experience with this sensation, looked as exhilarated as the rest of us as we followed Jessica through the continuous stream of traffic.
“Jasper’s Sight is a key component in how this room works,” said Jessica, as a city bus dashed neatly through half of her body. “He can summon any of his memories or visions into it and they’ll come alive for anyone in here to see. One of the niftiest things about that Sight of his, as you know, is that he is capable of seeing other people’s memories just by touching them…”
My heart skipped a beat as I remembered that Jasper had seen all of my memories from the other night, from the Brotherhood’s attack on Harriet’s house to Connor’s death in Portland. I felt both excited and terrified; excited because it meant I could see a past Connor come to life in this room, and terrified because it meant I would have to relive those horrible events all over again in living color…
Jessica put her hands out to her sides and our surroundings changed again. The buildings shifted and changed shaped, becoming shorter. The sky remained a nighttime one but something popped up across it— rows of hanging lanterns, all lifeless and extinguished except for the one directly above us, which glowed fiercely red… The rushing traffic vanished and was replaced by a large crowd of people that I recognized, most of them young and covered in paint…
My insides churned sickeningly, not just from being back at the giant party in the hour before Connor died, but because there, far ahead of us at the end of the street, were the ten masked members of the Brotherhood, their eyes glinting menacingly through the holes in their masks as they stared down at us through the path in the crowd.
I wanted to scream, to grab Connor and run, just as I had when I lived this scene before, but he was nowhere in sight. I looked around and saw only Jessica, Sylvie, Lizzie, and Hortensia, curiously gazing around at the new surroundings that they weren’t quite familiar with.
Connor’s absence wasn’t the only thing off about this memory; it was also the crowd and the Brotherhood. They all appeared frozen in time, like they were a video that had been put on pause. Not one of the paint-covered partygoers so much as twitched or blinked or breathed. They all simply stared at the spot beneath the red lantern where Connor and I had stood, but where I now stood with Jessica and the girls. Every face in the crowd was filled with confusion and distrust, the way they had stared at me and Connor like we had some sort of infectious disease.
“Is that…?” began Lizzie.
“The Brotherhood,” I said, gazing down at them across the frozen crowd.
The girls all shifted, bracing themselves for an attack. Sylvie raised her sword, Lizzie her crossbow, and Hortensia her long quarterstaff, but the Brotherhood didn’t move. The Patriarch at the head of the pack failed to raise his gun the way he had the moment he found me and Connor.
“This is Arthur’s memory from the other night in Portland,” said Jessica. “I’ve brought it to us on pause so you can get a look at the Brotherhood, at what you’ll be expecting tonight…”
The girls lowered their weapons and walked forward into the path in the crowd. Jessica put a gentle hand on my shoulder as we followed them. We stopped in front of the Patriarch, his men flanking him like wolves. I imagined salivating fangs under those black masks.
Sylvie stood only inches from the Patriarch as she examined his masked face, wearing an expression of disgust similar to Harriet’s when she had first seen Father Gabriel in the cemetery.
Suddenly, the Patriarch came alive from the magical freeze and raised the gun in his hand. The girls and I all jumped and raised our weapons, but Sylvie was closest and quickest. She swung her sword, quick as lightning, and the long blade tore through the air and right through the Patriarch’s neck.
The scene froze again, and the Patriarch remained unhurt with his gun raised, but I was sure that if he had actually been there in the flesh, his head would now be rolling on the ground.
“Great reflexes!” said Jessica. “Master of the sword, too, apparently.”
Sylvie smiled and shrugged her shoulders in an it-was-nothing sort of way. Lizzie materialized out of thin air next to me, and I hadn’t even noticed that she had vanished.
“The crossbow went invisible too!” she said excitedly. “How cool is that?!”
&nbs
p; “Very cool,” said Jessica. “You are going to be unseen death coming for the Brotherhood.”
Sylvie raised her hand for a high five and Lizzie eagerly clapped her hand to hers.
“Now you all know what the Brotherhood looks like,” said Jessica. “I have total confidence in all four of you. We’ve got tonight completely in the bag and by the end of it, your Bonding Ceremony will be complete, and you’ll be fully joined together as a coven.”
“What about the swan?” asked Hortensia. “The traitor witch?”
“Jasper’s working on a spell to help us learn more about her using those feathers I picked up,” said Jessica. “But in the meantime, let her squawk. She’s no match for the Sacred Four.”
We turned and left the Brotherhood behind, the Patriarch still frozen with his gun raised, and walked past the many motionless partygoers back to the spot under the glowing red lantern. I paused for a moment and looked up at it. It was utterly surreal to be standing in the same spot where I had stood with Connor not even two days ago, feeling so terrified, doomed to die by the Brotherhood’s bullets, but now surrounded by the people who had the power to destroy them.
We followed Jessica out of the Illusion Room, and I closed the door on the party in Portland, the crowd now staring at the empty space beneath the red lantern. Jessica led us back into the Combat Cave so we could store our weapons until later that evening when we would need them. As we headed down to the second floor, I let the girls go ahead of me. They chatted excitedly about everything we had just seen on the tour of the third floor. I turned to Jessica.
“I’m wondering,” I said, “why you—”
“Why I didn’t show Connor and your past self in that memory?” she asked, guessing exactly what I was going to say. “I didn’t want to open your wounds,” she said softly. “It was necessary for the girls to see the Brotherhood, but I didn’t feel comfortable showing your past self and Connor without talking to you about it first. I hope that’s okay. You can always take them in there and show them the full memory yourself, if you want.”
