The Secret of the Sacred Four

by E J Elwin

  “Are you saying you won’t—?”

  “Of course not,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I just want you to know how I feel and that I worry. I also feel that it’s keeping you at a distance from your sisters.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “We were bonded by blood just last night.”

  “I mean emotionally,” she said. “I fear that you might become attached to the Halfway Place, to your existence with Connor as it is there. I remember how hard it was to leave Lana behind in those Paris streets. I can’t say I wasn’t more than a little tempted to abandon the sad world she had left in her wake and follow her to wherever she went next…”

  “I know that he can’t come back,” I said, my throat constricting, “and that he has to move on. But not yet. Not this second.”

  She stroked my hair and there was sadness in her bright blue eyes, but she gave me a small smile before she turned away.

  **

  The view of the ocean was stunning through the wide windows of the second floor bathroom. I felt, as the warm shower rained down on me, that I could be swimming out there in that blue water. I could think only of Connor, of his own ocean that surrounded him where he was. I knew that Harriet and Jessica were right, that the time to say my final goodbye to him was coming soon. Just letting myself imagine the impending reality of Connor being fully and permanently gone, of not being able to see or talk to him ever again, made me choke.

  I thought of the way Deidre and that man had looked at each other in the creek. I missed having that for myself. I yearned for it. There was no other feeling in the world like the one of Connor looking at me with love in his eyes, then communicating it with his hands, his lips… What I had with him was luckier than lucky, more magical than magic, once in a lifetime.

  The problem with such happiness was that once it was gone, it was hard to live how you did before it. Both times he died, I lost myself completely and almost immediately set out to join him. I only hadn’t because solutions had presented themselves. The first time, Harriet gave me the resurrection spell. The second time, Jessica sent me to the Halfway Place. The next time, there wouldn’t be a solution. There wouldn’t be an end to the grief. And I still hadn’t learned how to survive it.

  CHAPTER 22

  Eyes Without a Face

  I changed into the pajamas I’d found in the Wardrobe Room and padded across the hall back to the bedroom. There was no one around and I heard no voices. I guessed that the girls were still up in the library absorbed in some magical volumes, and that Harriet and Jessica were in the sunroom or out on the balcony. Jasper, of course, was in a deep sleep.

  I got into bed and then decided to take the pajamas off. I’d developed the habit of sleeping naked. I thought of Deidre walking out of the creek, the sunlight gleaming off her wet skin. I turned over and closed my eyes, hoping I wouldn’t have swan related nightmares.

  Instead, my dreams were full of mourning Connor. I ran around in the empty McFadden’s Irish Pub in the Halfway Place looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found. I looked hopelessly under tables and outside the door on the rocks by the ocean, then climbed the stairs to the upper floors. They were darkened, empty, dead. Connor had left without me, without saying goodbye. I lay down on the floor in the storage room between the many boxes and curled up into a ball, wishing for him to come back or for me to be whisked off to where he was…

  I was awoken by muffled voices outside the door. I opened my eyes to a very dimly lit room. The afternoon outside the window had gone, and the sky was the precise shade of indigo it had been in that place where we’d left Deidre and her lover. I heard the voices again.

  “Well, let’s wake him up!” came Sylvie’s voice. There was a knock on the door and then it creaked open. “Arthur?”

  I heard their footsteps and saw them through the thin white curtains around the bed.

  “Arthur, it’s us,” said Lizzie.

  “Hey,” I said. They opened the curtains and revealed themselves to be dressed to go out. Lizzie had curled her blonde hair and all three of them had put on makeup. They looked older in the dim light.

  “Get dressed!” said Sylvie. “We’re going to Huerta’s for our victory dinner!”

  “Victory dinner?” I asked.

  “Our victory last night, duh!” said Sylvie.

  “Then later we’re going flying!” said Hortensia breathlessly.

  I had completely forgotten about the planned trip to Saddle Mountain to go out on broomsticks for the first time. “I’m… I’m not really up to it,” I said.

  “What?!” said Sylvie, as though what I’d said was unthinkable.

  “What do you mean, not up to it?” asked Lizzie, in such a disappointed voice that I almost changed my answer on reflex.

  “I, um… I’m going to the Halfway Place again to see Connor.”

  “That’s no problem!” said Hortensia. “That’s only an hour, right? We can wait for you!”

  Their persistent push to include me made me feel guilty. “I’m just not feeling well,” I said. “I think I ate too much at brunch…”

  “But you are going flying with us, right?” asked Hortensia.

  “Um, maybe, yeah, if I feel better later…”

  “Arthur, are you okay?” asked Sylvie, her voice much softer. She came over and sat at the edge of the bed, and Lizzie and Hortensia followed her.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound breezy. “It’s just a stomach ache. The thing about the Halfway Place is only my soul has to leave the house while my stomach stays behind on the living room floor.”

  “We can hold off on the victory dinner until you’re better?” she said. “It’s not really complete without you. I mean, you did torch the traitor witch and everything.”

  “No, it’s fine, really,” I said. “We’ll see each other afterward.”

  “Okay,” she said, the disappointment clear in her voice. “We’ll have to do it again together another night this week…”

  “Sounds good,” I said, with my best attempt at a smile.

  “Feel better,” she said, grasping my hand. I felt a mild electric shock like I had when we first shook hands the other night, but then wondered if I imagined it.

  **

  I lay there a few minutes longer, watching the twilit sky grow steadily darker. When the deep indigo finally gave way to black, I pulled the sheets off myself and rose to dress. I pulled on the new jeans and t-shirt I’d found in the Wardrobe Room. The t-shirt was black with an abstract design of a blue rose that reminded me a lot of the blue Sacred Rose that Jessica had created, which corresponded to Lizzie and her gifts, and which was also the same shade as Connor’s eyes.

  Halfway down the winding staircase, I saw Harriet at the bottom about to come up.

  “You’re up!” she said. “Jessica and the girls just left for Huerta’s. They were very sad you couldn’t go with them.” I felt another twinge of guilt. “I was just about to wake Jasper,” she said.

  “I can do it,” I offered. “We’ll be down in a second!”

  She looked puzzled as I ran up the stairs, but then called out: “Don’t be afraid to be loud!”

  I reached Jasper’s door, knocked, and then realized that would be nowhere near enough to wake him. I pushed the door open and his snores immediately bombarded me, filling the whole room. I crept toward him, still acting like I didn’t want to disturb him, which was precisely the opposite of what I was there to do. It was learned behavior. I, myself, hated being woken up.

  When I was younger, in the days before I relied on alarm clocks to wake me up for school, one or the other of my parents would come into my room to do it. My mom would rest a gentle hand on my forehead and murmur my name with eternal patience, while my dad, on the other hand, would bark my name out like a drill sergeant and then yank the covers off me if I didn’t immediately respond. One morning, when he was in a particularly foul mood, he upended my mattress with me still in it. I sprained my left pi
nky finger and sustained a nasty bruise to my face. My mom was a ball of fury. It was the closest I’d ever seen her to striking my dad.

  “Jasper?” I said, but my voice was barely as high as his snores, and I wondered why I had volunteered to do this.

  I groped around for the lamp on his bedside table but couldn’t find the switch to turn it on. Suddenly, it flicked on by itself, lighting the room in soft gold. I looked at it in amazement. There was no switch. Unless it was one of those touch-activated lamps, and I didn’t think it was, it had turned on because I wanted it to. Jessica and Jasper must have added me to their pre-set spells, making it so that I could turn the lamps on and off with only a thought or wave of a hand like they could.

  I looked down at Jasper, who lay flat on his back with his blankets up to his bearded chin. I took a deep breath and gathered up my voice from deep within my gut.

  “JASPER!” I shouted so loud I was sure Harriet had caught it downstairs.

  Jasper’s snores caught and then his eyes peeled open. I was amazed at how deep that post-Sight Heightening Spell sleep was. I was certain that anyone else would have woken up in a wild panic after a roaring shout like the one I’d just let out.

  “Arthur?” he said sleepily. “Dinner time?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  He stretched and let out a grunt as loud as his snores, reminding me of a grizzly bear. He pulled the covers off himself and revealed a bare hairy chest. I thought for a moment that he was naked but then he sat up and I saw that he was wearing striped boxer shorts.

  I glanced around at his bedroom as he got dressed, at the gleaming motorcycle parts on the walls and the big wooden chest at the foot of his bed that looked like a pirate’s treasure chest. His rusty black cauldron, which was so similar to Harriet’s, sat in a corner by the window. On a small wooden table next to it, I spotted a black feather— the last of the three feathers Jessica had collected from Deidre, and the only known remnant of the dark swan’s body that wasn’t ash.

  “What other questions do you think you might have?” I asked, remembering his reason for preserving the third feather.

  He emerged from the neck of his t-shirt and glanced at the feather. “Could be anything,” he said. “The Brotherhood doesn’t really have a single headquarters, but it could point us to someplace where they gather. We could find it and destroy it. Or, if we want to learn more about the ten innocent witches who were killed, it could be useful for that. They had to have been preserving those hearts somewhere. Maybe we’ll want to release them…”

  I imagined twelve hearts arranged in a neat row in a freezer somewhere and shivered.

  We went down to the sunroom, where Harriet was setting out steaming plates of roast chicken and vegetables on the dining table. There was a new bottle of the same California chardonnay we’d had the previous evening before the Bonding Ceremony, along with a jug-sized mug of coffee for Jasper.

  “I’m afraid it’s not quite one of Jessica’s feasts,” said Harriet.

  “It looks delicious, Harriet, thank you,” said Jasper, seizing the coffee mug.

  We ate quickly. Jasper didn’t talk much as he was busy either shoveling down his food or taking large gulps of coffee. Every now and then, I saw Harriet watching me thoughtfully over her glass of wine. I imagined Jessica and the girls nestling into one of the cozy booths at Huerta’s with the red table cloths and candles in the center. I hoped they were having a good time.

  Within twenty minutes, Harriet was levitating our empty plates to the kitchen. A large pot of coffee hovered out past them and refilled Jasper’s mug. Harriet stood up.

  “Shall we get to spellcasting?”

  **

  I lay in the circle of Crossing Crystals in the exact spot that I had the other two times. Harriet handed me one of the silk pillows from the red velvet couch, which I placed under my head. She then leaned down and grasped the black and white candles on the coffee table. Every one of the lamps shut off as the candles were both ignited, along with all of the other white ones spread throughout the room. We were back in the luxurious cave that flickered with candlelight.

  Harriet knelt down on the rug beside me, and Jasper joined her, taking Jessica’s place. Unlike Jessica, Harriet didn’t feel the need to play music during these spells, so it was unusually quiet as she and Jasper closed their eyes and put their palms out to their sides. Harriet then began the spell that I now almost knew by heart, even though I’d only heard it twice before:

  “As the night falls, and stars come alive…”

  I closed my eyes and thought of Connor, of how excited I was to see him, and how grateful I was that it was still possible. A breeze blew through the room, gradually growing stronger. I opened my eyes to see the Crossing Crystals starting to glow and the many tiny flames dancing around us, just as Harriet picked up Jessica’s sapphire knife.

  She lightly poked my ring finger and then held the knife over the black candle on the coffee table. The flame shot up several inches and turned the bright red color of my blood, and the flames all around the room danced wildly, making me think of cheering spectators. The violet light inside the crystals pulsated and dazzled my eyes.

  “A meeting once more, his pain may it cease

  A final goodbye, a bid to bring peace…”

  Harriet’s and Jasper’s hair flew around in the gale now blustering through the room.

  “We send him forth, yet anchor him here

  He will return, so said the great Seer…”

  The room started to spin, and I felt once again like I had boarded a merry-go-round. Harriet then shouted the next line of the spell, and Jasper joined her in his booming deep voice.

  “Volant per astra!” It was Latin. Hortensia, the tetralingual witch, would know what it meant, I thought hazily as the room spun around me. “Volant per astra! VOLANT PER ASTRA!”

  The ground turned to liquid and the room became a blur. Just as I felt I was about to be sick, I shot up toward the ceiling and right through it into the night sky and the space beyond, faster and faster, spinning and spinning.

  My eyes flew open to see the ceiling of McFadden’s above me. I jumped up from my usual spot on the floor behind the bar and looked around for Connor. But the room was empty.

  I darted out from behind the bar, ran to the front door, and pushed it open. The endless moonlit sea crashed against the rocks but Connor wasn’t there either. I looked up at the unusually large full moon and twinkling stars before closing the door and turning back to the pub.

  My heart skipped unpleasantly as I remembered my dream from earlier, where I had searched the pub in vain for Connor until I found that he had left without saying goodbye…

  I pushed the thought away and rushed toward the hallway that led to the staircase to the upper floors. He wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. I hesitated at the foot of the stairs. Connor knew that I had no desire to go up there, to the place where he died. I kicked open the doors to the bathrooms but they were empty. It was silly of course, since Connor no longer had to use the bathroom in his soul form, though it had been worth a try as I remembered that he could still drink beer and feel its effects.

  I took a breath and then hurtled up the stairs. The second floor bar, which was laid out like the main one below, was darkened and empty, chairs stacked neatly on the tables, exactly as it had looked on Earth when Connor and I first saw it. I remembered the sounds of laughter and bottles breaking as the Brotherhood had stopped to have drinks during their rampage. I felt a fiery satisfaction as I thought of them buried in the Tillamook Head woods.

  I turned from the scene and leapt up the steps to the third floor, to the place I dreaded seeing again… I came to the door with the sign on it that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, and for a moment, I was back in that desperate night. I steeled myself, wondering what Connor could be doing in this room, then pushed the door open. It swung open with a creak like before.

  A little luck of the Irish, Connor’s voice echoed in my head as I stepped in
to the shadowy room. The boxes of liquor and bar supplies were arranged in tightly packed rows, stacked nearly to the ceiling, exactly as they had been before Connor and I had barricaded the door with them.

  “Connor?” There was no response. I squeezed through the tight rows of boxes toward the windows, where the bright light from the moon shined in. I reached the place where we had lobbed our Molotov cocktails out at the Brotherhood, and my heart sunk. Connor wasn’t there.

  I looked out at the endless sea rushing against the rocks around the building. Cold despair swept through me, as if the ocean water below had entered my veins. I couldn’t believe that Connor had left me forever without saying goodbye. He promised he would meet me here again, that he wouldn’t leave until he’d heard the tale of me and my sisters beating the Brotherhood.

  But then… Why was this place still here? If this pub was a manifestation of the place where Connor died, why was it still in the Halfway Place if he had already departed for good?

  As if paired with this thought, a faint light appeared in the corner of the room, in the place where our backpacks filled with clothes had sat. I gasped as I noticed something that definitely hadn’t been there before. A series of metal rungs were set into the wall, leading up to a thin square of light in the ceiling. A trapdoor. It was the kind of trapdoor that usually led to an attic in a house, though I knew that this building only had three floors. Or at least it had on Earth.

  Then I heard music, a most familiar song: “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House, the song that had been playing when Connor and I first burst into McFadden’s Pub seeking shelter from the Brotherhood’s attack. It came muffled through the cracks in the trapdoor.

  Hope burst in my chest as I rushed to the ladder and stepped onto the metal rungs. I reached the ceiling in a few steps and pushed the trapdoor open, remembering when I had done the same thing after Connor and I reached the end of the torchlit passage beneath Harriet’s house. I felt the cool night breeze in my hair and smelled the salty sweet scent of the ocean before I climbed onto the roof of the building. My mouth fell open in wonder as I laid eyes on the scene.