The Secret of the Sacred Four

by E J Elwin

  We reached the ground floor and found Harriet sitting by the coffee table, six boldly orange-colored drinks in front of her, the glasses garnished with orange peels. As I took a seat around the table and toasted our victory against the Brotherhood, I remembered what Connor said in the Halfway Place when I told him I wasn’t ready to say goodbye: Then don’t. It’s not over yet. Not this second.

  The orange cocktail was delicious, mostly sweet but with an earthy herbal edge. It was called a Hanky-Panky, Harriet explained, invented in London in the early 1900s.

  “It’s heavenly, Harriet!” said Jessica, after her first sip.

  “Hmm, maybe I’ll call it Harriet’s Heavenly Hanky-Panky,” said Harriet.

  “That sounds… inappropriate,” said Hortensia.

  We all laughed and Harriet had to set her cocktail down to keep from spilling it. “The term ‘hanky-panky’ at the time in England actually referred to witchcraft,” she said. “I thought it the perfect drink to celebrate the Bonding Ceremony and our triumph over the Brotherhood.”

  “The way you handled all those knives was amazing,” said Hortensia.

  “How about the way you ran through those trees like a ghost!” said Harriet. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  We proceeded to run through everything that had happened during the battle, highlighting favorite moments and learning about each other’s individual experiences. They were all delighted to hear about how my axes had caught fire while one of them was inside a man.

  “It makes sense that they would,” said Jessica. “Lizzie’s crossbow turns invisible with her and Hortensia’s staff goes incorporeal.”

  “Does that mean my sword can fly?” Sylvie joked.

  “Maybe!” said Jessica. “You’ll find out if you ever drop it in the air.”

  Sylvie described the rush of flying in battle, a euphoric thrill she hadn’t felt before, even though she’d already flown here in the house. Hortensia and Lizzie said similar things about their powers. I told them I’d felt the same way when I used my flames to incinerate the traitor witch.

  “I still can’t believe I missed that!” said Sylvie.

  “We can still catch it,” said Jessica. “Jasper saw it, and he can put his memory of it into the Illusion Room for us all to see!”

  “Oh, that’s right, I forgot about that!” said Sylvie. “We can watch the whole thing! It’ll be like a home movie!”

  “With stabbings and roasting swan,” said Hortensia with a smirk.

  “I wish we could have seen what she looked like in her human form,” said Lizzie.

  “That one form was enough for me,” I said, remembering the blood-red eyes.

  We talked about Sylvie’s fight with the last man standing, or at least who we’d thought was the last man standing at the time. Everyone praised Lizzie’s skill with the crossbow and congratulated her for being the one to end the Patriarch. We discovered that we’d all experienced the same heady feeling of familiarity and power as we wielded our weapons.

  “I just knew I could do it,” said Lizzie. “I knew I could hit them right where I wanted to if I just focused and wanted it badly enough.” Sylvie, Hortensia, and I nodded our understanding.

  In the end, we all agreed that the best part had been the rainbow force field, which had been as impenetrable as it was beautiful, and which no one had expected. “Do you think we could survive a building collapse or a gas explosion in that thing?” asked Sylvie with glee.

  “I’m sure you could,” said Harriet.

  Sylvie looked positively peppy, like she wanted to go out right then and find a building on the brink of collapse to test our force field with.

  “You each defy death in your own individual ways,” said Harriet. “Tonight, you defied it as one with the force field. It was no accident that it was born right at the moment the Bonding Ceremony was completed. It’s a power that belongs to all of you as a coven.”

  “And one that isn’t mentioned at all in the prophecy!” Jessica added excitedly. “Just like Arthur’s teleporting in ash the other night. Who knows what other gifts we’ll see!”

  She and Harriet clinked their cocktail glasses together, and the girls and I mimicked them, slurping up the last of our Hanky-Pankys. I gnawed absentmindedly on the orange peel garnish and suddenly remembered something Jasper said in the clearing before the Ceremony, which was very similar to what Jessica had just said: Let’s just say that your teleporting by ash into our house isn’t the only thing not mentioned in Ursula’s prophecy that we’re likely to see…

  I ran through the list of things that had now happened which had previously been thought impossible: the spontaneous rainbow force field, involuntary teleportation by ash, the very existence of the Sacred Four. Couldn’t it be equally feasible to achieve another magical feat previously thought impossible… like resurrecting ashes? Was there a chance I could bring Connor back after all? I had to believe there was.

  **

  It was just past four in the morning when we all went up to bed. As I pulled off the shoes, jeans, and David Bowie t-shirt from the Wardrobe Room, I expected them to grow back to the sizes they’d been when I found them. Instead, they remained my size, looking like any non-magical clothes I would own. I set them on the armchair next to the four-poster bed and then did a double-take at the Bowie shirt.

  I was sure that I’d gotten it sprayed with the blood of those two Brotherhood members I’d axed, but it now looked pristine and freshly laundered. Jasper’s house-cleaning magic, which had cleaned our weapons for us, apparently extended to cleaning clothes as well. Connor would get a kick out of this, I thought as I climbed into bed. Imagine not having to do chores anymore!

  Just like Jasper, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. A black swan engulfed in flames squawked and flailed across my mind, but then vanished. In its place, there appeared a beautiful boy with blond hair sitting outside an Irish pub, skipping beer bottle caps over an endless moonlit sea.

  **

  “Brunch, witches!”

  Jessica’s magically heightened voice reverberated through the house. I smelled the fried green peppers and cheddar cheese of a Denver Omelet before I even opened my eyes. My mouth watered as I blinked in the sunlight beaming in through the window. It was much later than when Jessica woke us the previous day. I guessed she had wanted us to sleep in since we’d all gotten to bed so late and had also exerted ourselves quite a bit fighting for our lives.

  I pulled on the jeans and Bowie t-shirt, and walked out into the hallway just as Hortensia and Lizzie emerged from two rooms several doors down.

  “And how is the coven this morning?” asked Hortensia with a grin.

  “Great!” said Lizzie. Her blonde hair was tied back in a long braid.

  Sylvie emerged from the same room that she and Lizzie had yesterday. Lizzie had clearly now felt comfortable enough to have a bedroom all to herself.

  “Morning,” said Sylvie, clearly having just rolled out of bed. She took a deep whiff of the air and then stumbled down the hallway, her arms held out in front of her like a zombie. “Omelet,” she said, shuffling toward the winding staircase.

  Hortensia, Lizzie and I chortled as we followed her. I expected her to leap over the banister like she had the previous day, but it seemed the tantalizing aroma of omelets was all she could think about. I glanced at the grandfather clock as we reached the ground floor and saw that it was nearly noon.

  We reached the kitchen, its vine-laced white cabinets painted in the sunlight pouring in through the sliding glass door, and saw Jessica and Harriet sitting out on the balcony.

  “Good morning!” said Jessica. “I hope you all don’t mind the late wake-up. I thought I’d give you some extra time to recover after all the excitement last night.”

  “No, it was perfect, thank you,” said Lizzie.

  We took our seats around the long wooden table, the salty smell of the sea mingling with the savory steaminess of the various omelets on the table. There
were also sides of bacon, toasted bagels, bowls of cereal, fresh fruit, and glasses of orange juice and coffee like our first breakfast.

  “Would anyone like some Bewitching Breakfast Blend?” asked Harriet.

  I remembered it was her own blend of tea that was extremely effective for waking up without any jitters like regular tea or coffee, and also cured hangovers. It was the tea that she, Connor, and I had all drank together on that first long peaceful day at her house… The girls all agreed to try some, and I watched their curious expressions as they sipped it.

  “Oh wow,” said Sylvie. “It really is… bewitching.”

  “Best tea I’ve ever had!” proclaimed Hortensia, to Harriet’s delight.

  “Aren’t you waking Jasper to join us?” Lizzie asked Jessica.

  “I’ll bring him a tray in a bit,” said Jessica. “Save him from having to climb down here.”

  We sipped our tea and orange juice, and devoured the delicious brunch for a while before Jessica spoke. “So Hortensia’s pretty keen on flying,” she said, addressing Harriet. “What do you think of taking them all out tonight for their first flight? Maybe drive out to Saddle Mountain?”

  I’d been to Saddle Mountain once with my parents. It was a large forested area a short drive outside of Seaside. It was known for its hiking trails, like Tillamook Head, except it had a lot more open space, with wide grassy fields packed with wildflowers. The biggest draw was the main trail which led to a summit that was over three thousand feet high, and featured spectacular panoramic views of the Pacific shoreline to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. Late at night, it would be a perfect secluded space to fly around on a broomstick…

  “I don’t see why not,” said Harriet. “Got to get them up in the air sooner or later!”

  Hortensia looked like she was about to vibrate out of her chair from excitement, but then suddenly deflated. “Oh crap, I have so much homework, and I’m so not in the mood to do it…”

  “Pfft,” said Sylvie, flicking a hand and taking a gulp of orange juice.

  Homework. The word sounded foreign and almost silly. The life where I worried about such things felt like a distant memory, like a funny dream I had.

  “Sweetie, don’t worry about that!” said Jessica. “A simple spell will take care of it.”

  “Really?” asked Hortensia.

  “Really?” asked Sylvie, suddenly intrigued.

  “Don’t get too used to it, because we won’t do it all the time,” said Jessica. “It’s not healthy for you and not very ethical either, but I think you all deserve a little break this weekend after risking your lives fighting for witch kind.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Sylvie, reaching for a bowl of cereal.

  She, Hortensia, and Lizzie began to talk excitedly about the prospect of soaring over Saddle Mountain on broomsticks. Sylvie wondered how similar flying on a broomstick would feel to her own gift of flight. I was excited to fly but I was more excited to see Connor, and I realized I hadn’t yet brought it up to Jessica that he and I had planned to meet again tonight. I opened my mouth to tell her, when the sliding glass door burst open. It was Jasper.

  “Sweetie, I was about to bring you breakfast!” said Jessica. “How did you wake up?”

  “My spell woke me up!” he said. He looked groggy but excited, his hair and beard standing up every which way.

  “Spell?” asked Jessica.

  “The spell to learn about the swan!”

  Jessica and Harriet gasped.

  “It’s done!” he said. “I know who she is.”

  “Is?” asked Sylvie. “You mean was? Arthur put her firmly in the past tense.”

  “Right, right, was,” said Jasper. “Anyway, I pulled up two visions about her life, using two out of the three feathers Jess picked up the other night. They should answer two of our most burning questions: how she could hate her own kind enough to murder us, and why she would need to work with the Brotherhood when she can do Magick Malevolent all by herself.”

  “Damn,” breathed Jessica. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get up to the Illusion Room!”

  We all scrambled out of our chairs like eager children leaving the classroom for the playground. Jasper snatched up a cinnamon bagel and some bacon strips from the table, and Harriet pushed a mug of her Bewitching Breakfast Blend into his hand before we all hurried into the house.

  “Her name was Deidre,” he said, as we followed him up the winding staircase.

  “Deidre?” I repeated. I’d never known anyone with the name.

  “Deidre Lane,” said Jasper.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Traitor

  The seven of us filed into the Illusion Room, Jasper chomping down on the last bits of his bagel and bacon. Just like the first time I entered this room, I thought it was pitch black for a moment before the starry night sky over the vast Irish countryside bloomed up in the darkness. Even though I had seen this place already, and had also seen it transform into a busy Tokyo street, my heart still fluttered with wonder at the sheer magic of it all. Had I woken up here that first morning instead of the bedroom downstairs, I never could have imagined I was on the third floor of a house in Seaside.

  “Erright,” said Jasper through a mouthful of bagel. “You all ready?”

  Everyone nodded and murmured their enthusiasm, eager to know who the mysterious traitor witch had been and how she could join forces with the Brotherhood.

  “I should warn you,” Jasper said, after swallowing the last of his food. “What you’re about to see is disturbing. I’ve caught glimpses of it. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

  Lizzie cleared her throat uneasily but then steeled herself, staring into the horizon across the starlit meadow in front of her as though some monster was set to come from that direction.

  “Just remember,” said Jasper, “they aren’t really here, and you aren’t really there…”

  He raised his arms up to his sides, palms up, the way Harriet and Jessica did, and the Irish meadow faded away around us. For a second, there was a sea of blurriness, like putting on someone else’s prescription eyeglasses, before dazzling sunlight exploded above us.

  I squinted around at our new surroundings. We stood on the sidewalk of a long residential street lined with squat, modestly sized houses. Tall palm trees with long curved trunks grew on either side of the road out of patches of dirt in the cement. Many of the patches were littered with trash that had clearly spilled out of the overflowing garbage cans posted at the curb. Nearby, a little boy toddled around on a patchy lawn in front of a rundown house, a shaggy black dog gamboling around him. An old man watched them drowsily from the front porch, a cigarette and a glass of milk in his hand, reminding me strikingly of Old Man Morley and how he parked himself in front of the Mom & Pop.

  “This is California,” said Jasper.

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “Plates,” he said. He pointed at a shabby old station wagon parked in the driveway of the small dark green house directly in front of us. The car did indeed have California license plates, and so did all the other cars parked in front of the surrounding houses. I noticed also that the cars were very old, all of them models from the 1970s or before, and guessed that this vision was several decades in the past.

  Jasper walked over to a muddy newspaper in the gutter by the road and squinted down at it. “February 1982,” he said. I realized I had no idea how old the traitor witch had been. I wondered what stage of her life we were about to find her in.

  “So where is she?” asked Sylvie, looking around.

  “Right over there…” said Jasper.

  We all turned to where he pointed to see a long, bright yellow school bus turning the corner. It came to a lurching halt in front of us, and its folding door creaked open.

  A little girl of about six years old hopped out onto the sidewalk. She had the pointed, delicate features of a porcelain doll, with cinnamon-colored eyes and milky pale skin that looked like she never
saw sunlight, which was strange considering she lived in California. Her pallid complexion contrasted starkly with the shock of jet black hair that hung around her shoulders. She wore a white dress that came down to her knees and battered little tennis shoes fastened with Velcro that looked like they must have been white once but were now a dull gray.

  The white dress combined with her pale skin made her look washed out, almost ghostly. The only other bold color about her besides her jet black hair was the bright red lunch box she carried, which featured an image of Minnie Mouse. Scrawled across Minnie’s distinctive big red bow with white polka dots were different-colored letters that spelled out DEIDRE, with the R drawn backwards.

  “There’s our traitor witch,” said Jasper.

  We all gaped at the little girl like she was an oddity in a museum. I couldn’t imagine those cinnamon-colored eyes becoming the blood-red ones of her swan form. It was mind-boggling to think that this small child would one day be capable of such violent crimes.

  We watched in amazement as she waved a tiny hand at another little girl still inside the bus. Then the bus pulled away in a cloud of thick smog, and the six-year-old Deidre Lane headed for the dark green house with the shabby station wagon in the driveway. A rusty mailbox that was barely standing on a cracked wooden post bore the word LANE in painted white letters.

  We followed Deidre across the front lawn which was more dirt than anything, with little islands of feeble grass here and there. An old lawn mower lay on its side in the dirt, thick cobwebs growing on the underside where the blades were. Deidre opened the front door of the house without hesitation, as though she had expected it to be unlocked, and Jasper led us inside after her. I put out my hand to keep the door open but then remembered that nothing around us here was solid, and we could just walk right through anything the way Hortensia could anywhere else. We all ghosted through the front door after Jasper and stepped into a long narrow hallway. Then the girls and I clapped hands to our noses.