Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  "Love to," Oliver said, taking a bite of eggs.

  * * * *

  In the daylight, the gardens surrounding the castle were even more magnificent. Dazzling blossoms encircled the stone staircase, some of them sneaking onto the steps, their petals crushed into the rough stone. They were majestic and strange, flowers that Abby had never seen. Some of the blooms were as large as basketballs, their petals heavy and drooping over their skinny, green necks.

  Abby saw their small rowboat tied to the dock. It reminded her of the previous night and she shuddered, wrapping her arms over her chest. The sky held billowing, marshmallow-like clouds that reflected in the calm lagoon water.

  "Aren't we going down?" Abby asked, as Elda passed the stairway and continued on.

  "No, we are going to another lagoon," Elda told her, gesturing in front of them where the pathway disappeared into a thicket of tall, flowering cherry trees.

  As they entered the blossoms, the cobblestone path gave way to crushed shells, bleached bone white. They crunched underfoot, and Abby stared, in wonder, around them. The blossoms were so thick that she could barely see deeper into the outer forest or gardens. Although glints of sun peeked through the pale pink blossoms, the trail grew darker as they progressed.

  Deeper on the trail, the ground sloped noticeably upward and back down again. Every few yards they passed a stone bench, and Abby longed to sit and stare at the plump flowers bursting around her. It reminded her of the sleep inducing poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. Until then, Abby had never encountered anything remotely similar, but the cherry blossoms brought wafts of air, fat with a hypnotic perfume.

  "Abby," Elda began, breaking the silence, "have you ever experienced any strange powers?"

  Abby shuffled her feet over the shells, not sure what to say. She tried to search for childhood experiences that stuck out, but found that she could only remember her mother's stifling love. Every moment of her past seemed tainted by her mother's watchful eyes and her mean little mouth, always pressed into a line of disappointment. Sometimes, she had pretended that she was special, a superhero or a mermaid, simply to escape the hot, dead stillness of her backyard where no kids ever came to play.

  "With Sydney," Abby said suddenly. "Sometimes I felt special with Sydney."

  "Who is Sydney?"

  "My aunt. She always said that she could attract anything she wanted just by thinking about it and that I had that power too, that we got it from her mother, Arlene. And even though I thought it was a game, I really believed it, and sometimes, I think it actually happened."

  Elda nodded.

  "Do you think that my Aunt Sydney is a witch?"

  "No, if she was, she would know it, and she sounds like the kind of woman that would have helped you in your own unveiling."

  "But what if she doesn't know? I mean, I didn't know. In fact, I still don't know."

  Elda chuckled and twisted a small silver ring on her pinky as she walked.

  "You will know soon enough, Abby, and then you will never doubt it again. Your aunt may have some special abilities. The ancestors of many witches do. Take Sebastian, for example. He is not a witch, but he is a powerful man, and when he learns to harness it, you will see that even ordinary people have amazing powers."

  "What about my mother?"

  Elda stopped and looked at Abby, searching her face.

  "Your mother was just a woman, and the power that you give her is just that, it's not real, and you can take it away any time."

  Abby swallowed hard, her mouth was suddenly dry and sticky. Was that true?

  She remembered a day; she must have been no older than seven or eight. She had walked into the kitchen, looking for a snack or some insignificant thing, and her mother had been at the sink. Abby could see from the curve of her back and the steady rise and fall of her shoulders that she was crying. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but her mother had turned and saw her. "You don't even know," she'd said, and her eyes were red rimmed and her face blotchy with emotion. She said nothing more, but stared at Abby as if she loathed her, and Abby had run. She hid in the shed for an hour, and when she returned to the house, her mother was ironing and her father was watching television, and they never spoke of it.

  Her mother had seemed filled with magic that day, but the worst kind, the sort of magic that worked slowly and invisibly, killing everything it touched.

  They moved out of the cherry trees into another large clearing that sloped down to a second lagoon. The water sparkled emerald green, kissing the white sand. A massive greenhouse, shaped like a scallop seashell, stood on the far side.

  "Wow," Abby breathed, staring at the glass structure in wonder. Abby had never gardened, but always felt a longing to learn. Once, when she was ten, her mother bought her a Venus Flytrap, which had withered and died in a matter of days.

  "That is our herb and vegetable garden," Elda told her. "It is one of a kind."

  Abby nodded, shuffling along in wonder. Sandstone cliffs stretched up behind the foliage surrounding the lagoon. It felt safe, like a new world.

  Elda led her to a pair of old wind-worn chairs perched high on a stone slab, which extended over the water. As they stepped onto the slab, Abby felt a rush, as if someone had blown on the back of her neck. She spun around, but the trail was empty, the only sounds were the waves rhythmically caressing the shore.

  "Please, sit," Elda told her. Her voice had changed and she closed her eyes for a moment, reveling in the vibrations around her.

  Abby sat, folded her hands in her lap and leaned her head against the overworked chair back. It groaned, but not in protest, it sounded gratified to have its space occupied. For a moment, she continued to ponder her surroundings, but slowly an inviting calm engulfed her, as if she'd slipped into a warm bath, and she closed her eyes.

  Neither Elda or Abby spoke. It was time for silence.

  A million thoughts crept toward the edge of her consciousness, but none penetrated, as if held back by an invisible force field. The temperature of her body climbed, the silk pants shifted from cool to sticky. She might have felt guilty or even worried about sweating in Dafne's clothing, but her mind was a blank slate of swirling energy. A tornado of blue light formed in her brain, churning and swelling. It continued to build, like a piece of bubble gum blown to maximum capacity. It pressed inside her skull, too full, and then it streaked down her spine. It awakened her chakras, beginning at the crown and ending at the root. The energy moved like a swarm of bees, stinging her cells to life.

  She sensed movement and forced her eyes open. Elda stood on the edge of the slab, her eyes trained on the lagoon, her white shawl billowing behind her like a parachute. Abby turned, with great effort, to follow Elda's gaze. The water was swirling, a jade circle widening in fury. Suddenly it reversed and began to twist upward - a writhing cone raised out of the water. Abby's entire body vibrated, her skin prickling with gooseflesh, while inside her body raged with fire. The chair shook beneath her, the wooden frame lifting and smacking the cement. Surely it would break, splinter into a thousand pieces in an explosion that would deafen their ears and leave them both picking slivers from their burned skin, but it did not. The fiendish power pooled back into the cool blue ball and slipped out, as if Abby was a sponge and someone had wrung her dry.

  Chapter 19

  Sebastian drank two more cups of coffee, wandered the sunlit breakfast room, stared out windows and ignored Oliver. Oliver chewed too loudly; he slurped his coffee and talked to the cat like it had insider information that Sebastian wasn't privy to.

  "Kissy," Oliver laughed, "don't you love breakfast at the castle? Man, Bridget is the best cook ever. Here have another sausage."

  Then he dropped a sausage to the already obese cat, who ate it ferociously, darting his eyes toward Sebastian and growling like he might try to steal the morsel of fried pork.

  "You tried the quiche, Sebastian?" Oliver asked, holding up a forkful. "Goat cheese."

  "No," Sebastian told him and retu
rned to the window.

  He couldn't see Abby and Elda, but wished they had invited him to join them. He had observed Claire summoning her element, not the first time, but later when she got better at it. He was curious to see Abby do it, partially because she seemed so rigid. He had to admit that he was somewhat surprised that she was a witch, though he didn't have many examples to draw from. However, with Claire it had made sense. She was a hippy child who grew up on wheat grass shots for breakfast and bonfire prayers beneath the full moon. His parents had raised Claire and him to see Mother Nature as the divine, to shirk off regular society and to question convention at every level.

  Learning that Claire was a witch hadn't come easy, especially when he realized that no one was talking about a pagan witch who burned incense and read tarot cards. However, her changes left no room for disbelief, and, in the end, he felt that maybe they both knew all along.

  He believed that Abby would struggle with the realization and wondered if discovering her element would open the portal of belief that hadn't yet appeared.

  "I planned to do a bit of shooting, practice my aim. You in?" Oliver asked, standing and stretching down to touch his toes. He bent to each side and then stretched above him again. "After some yoga, that is."

  "Sure, got an extra bow?" Sebastian asked hastily, ready for a challenge. Maybe now he would have a chance to redeem himself.

  * * * *

  Abby slumped back in the chair, her hands gripping the wooden arms painfully. They felt real, solid, they were not a swirling mountain of water conjured from nothing. Her heart pounded in her ears. Elda had turned and stood watching her, a small smile curving her pink lips.

  "Water," she told Abby firmly. "Your element is water."

  "My element," Abby choked, her throat hoarse.

  "Yes, you did that." Elda was proud of her, nearly beaming. She strode off the cement slab to the water's edge.

  Abby stood shakily and followed. The water had returned to its early glassiness, the airborne monster gone from its depths.

  "I... how, how did I do that?" Abby whispered, standing close to Elda, comforted by the motherly smell that blanketed her.

  "Abby, you are an extraordinary witch, and witches draw their power from an element of this world." Elda took Abby's hands firmly in her own.

  Abby watched the flecks of light swimming in Elda's ashen eyes. They shone with excitement.

  "Let us sit," Elda said.

  Abby turned back toward the slab, but Elda tugged her roughly away. "No, too much energy there," Elda explained. "Over here."

  They walked halfway around the lagoon, moving closer to the shell shaped greenhouse. Abby could see rows of jumbled flowers, pots and bristly plants. They crawled over the glass windows, their branches and petals splayed in obscene vegetation. On the cliff, towering behind the glass conservatory, Abby eyed a swatch of color, so brief that she could have imagined it. As she watched, it flashed again. A ripple of black swelled against the deep green pines jutting from the cliff. Dafne. Abby could see her clearly for an instant, her face stark in her mane of shiny black hair. Abby felt a mean satisfaction that Dafne watched them, that she broke her routine to spy, but then it dissipated as she remembered the cyclone of water. Who wouldn't want to watch it?

  Elda guided her to two bronze garden chairs tucked alongside a mass of wild roses that flecked the right side of the greenhouse. A bronze table sat between them. Abby sat while Elda disappeared into the greenhouse, emerging a few moments later with a massive black book bursting with loose pages. She laid it on the table carefully, as if placing an infant rather than a bulky text.

  Abby leaned toward the cover, eyes widening in surprise.

  "You have seen one," Elda asked her, as if expecting this.

  "Yes," Abby murmured. "Sebastian has one."

  "Really?" Elda's eyebrows raised in surprise. "Claire must have received it from Adora. That does not bode well for my old friend."

  "Adora? You knew her well?"

  "Yes, I knew her many years ago. She was an exceptional witch, but she never did well in covens, and it can be dangerous to live without one."

  "Why would she give the book to Claire?"

  "For safekeeping, I would imagine. Perhaps she believed that she was in danger."

  "From the Vipers?"

  "Vepars, and we will get to them later."

  The leather book before them had a single title inscribed in the upper left corner: Coven of Voda, the words a deep crimson faded by time and touch.

  "Voda?" Abby asked, not recognizing the name.

  "It means water in Croatian. This book has been with us for a very long time." Elda looked at it lovingly. "Water is your power, Abby, it is the source of your energy."

  Abby nodded and looked at the book, but she no longer needed tangible evidence of her uniqueness. She had seen it with her own eyes. Then again, maybe she was delusional. She was probably in a coma somewhere having crazy dreams, or maybe Tobias had killed her and this was heaven.

  "I understand your skepticism, Abby," Elda told her.

  "I'm sorry, Elda. I still don't get it." Exasperation flooded her voice and she stared hard at the woman across from her. If this wasn't a dream and it wasn't death, then it needed to be put into words that made some damn sense.

  "Abby, think of human life, the way that most people live it, as a simulation. Everyone has their own separate reality. If you lived your entire life as a woman in an indigenous tribe in the Australian outback, and then one day you were picked up and flown to New York City to live in a penthouse with servants, would it seem impossible? Could you watch television, images and voices coming from a box, with anything less than shock and disbelief?"

  "Well, of course it would be shocking, but I would be seeing those things with my own eyes. I would have to believe them."

  Elda smiled, but said nothing.

  "But why doesn't anyone else know about witches?"

  "They do, but people rationalize things that they don't understand. History and legends and myths and stories are all the same. Were you alive when the Europeans came to America and slaughtered thousands of Native Americans? No, but you still believe in the validity of this historical fact. Much of history has been suppressed. I might even say that most of history has been suppressed. And the rest has been manipulated to support the powers that be, whether those are government or church or some dictator seeking control of the masses. Witches had power that regular men did not, and that was scary to some men, scary enough to kill those witches, deny their power and re-write their history as myth."

  A vague feeling of recognition stole over Abby. She knew that much of recorded history was loaded with agenda, she had just never realized how much was hidden. And she was being given an opportunity to learn the lies from the facts. "That's right, Abby, at any time, you can know the truth. This is the truth." Elda laid her hand on the Book of Shadows, and Abby stared at it, newly mesmerized.

  "This book," Elda continued. "Is from a coven in Croatia that existed thousands of years ago in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a story that I have come by laboriously and only in fragments, but they were one of the first covens that organized themselves by their element of power. In their case, water."

  Abby pondered this, but nodded for Elda to continue.

  "Your element is water, as is mine. When you are on the energy table," Elda pointed back to the stone slab, "your power is drawn out in its purest form. It is a place of indescribable energy, and we use the table to pinpoint the elements of each witch. It has many other uses, but we will skip those for now."

  "How do I learn all of this?" Abby asked. "I mean where do I begin with really understanding this?"

  Elda smiled and Abby noticed the crisscross of soft wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. She wondered Elda's age, but thought that she might not be ready to know the answer. Abby had not known many old people in her life. Her grandmother, Arlene, had died when she was young, and her father's parents had died before she was
born. When she talked with the elderly, she always felt a chasm between them, like they lived in two different worlds, but wanted to pretend that they didn't. Now she was actually talking to an older woman who truly lived in another world, and the distance was palpable.

  "This is not a crash course in history," Elda said, suddenly sounding tired. "It is only a beginning. When you learn the truth of yourself and believe it, other truths come naturally. Some things we will tell you, and some things you will just know."

  "What can witches do? I mean, what can I do?"

  "That's better," Elda said. "There are many other powers, beyond the water, that is. Some that we all seem to possess and some that will belong to you alone."

  "Which do we all have?" Abby asked, surprised at how easily the 'we' rolled off her tongue. She imagined her mother's narrowed eyes, the way she rolled them when Abby believed something absurd, or not absurd, but simply unappealing to her mother.

  "Where did you go just now?" Elda asked.

  "To my mother. She's like the little doubtful devil on my shoulder."

  Elda laughed, a light sound, like far-off wind chimes.

  "Mothers are our portal into this world and the chains that strap us to it."

  "Yes, mine was more like a barbed wire fence."

  Elda nodded, but did not ask more.

  "Before I explain the powers of a witch, you must understand that you may have never experienced them before. Witches manifest their power at different times in their life. I feel that you are only just beginning, probably because you have led a very structured life. Here, with us, these abilities will come much more quickly, which is for the best."

  Again Abby wanted to blurt out, "What are they?" but she managed to contain herself.

  "Firstly, there is night vision. You will see better at night, although it will not be crystal clear, it will be very similar to watching everything beneath dim bulbs. This is true for even the blackest room, void of all light sources." Elda watched Abby's face closely as she spoke.