Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  In the glovebox, he discovered a small tool kit and figured that he could at least attempt to start the car with a screwdriver. He pulled the screwdriver out along with a box of matches and, to his delight, he spotted a set of keys tucked snugly between a box of band aids and a roll of duck tape.

  "Come on, baby." He immediately started to smooth-talk her as he slipped the key in and turned. Nothing.

  ****

  Victor trotted through the dark tunnels, sliding in the pools of water and casting his dark, twinkling eyes back at her whenever the gap between them started to grow. As they moved deeper into the rock, Abby's cavalier feelings shifted and she found breath harder and harder to come by. The passages narrowed and, when her head nearly scraped the ceiling and Victor had to duck to go on, she laid a hand on the wall beside her and stopped. It felt slimy and wet and she started to recoil and pull her hand away, but then left it. The wall beat a steady thrum of pulses into her hand and with those pulses came flashes of sight.

  Victor turned, puzzled.

  "What is it?" he asked, returning to where she stood and placing his own hand on the slick wall.

  Abby expected him to feel it too, but his face remained perplexed.

  "Don't you feel it?" she asked, closing her eyes because she wanted to catch the images as they passed. The water was speaking to her.

  At first they came so briefly, she barely saw anything, but then...a flash of blond hair followed by a howling and writhing body on the ground, blood pouring from a wound in the side of its head. Not a Vepar she saw, but a man, his face glistening with sweat, his hands pressed into his temples. The hair again and then a face...Vesta. Then the vision changed and she watched the tunnels as they emptied, Vepars with bloody mouths and heavy feet barreling up out of the earth on a black, moonless night. The dungeons below lay deserted except for...traps. Traps everywhere, spells of evil made stronger through human sacrifice. The room that Toni died in held thousands of black slithering snakes, the poison in their gums filled with the venom of Vepars.

  Abby pulled her hand away and teetered on her feet, nearly falling as she attempted to see in the dark passage. Victor caught her, holding her shoulders in his hands and steadying her.

  "What did you see?"

  "We have to leave here." She choked it out, her throat and mouth bone dry.

  She heard his own breathing becoming thinner, whistling through his nose.

  "The air," he said. "My power..."

  Victor was an air element and, as the air in the cave lessened and grew thicker with...something—Abby didn't know what, only that it smelled noxious and felt thick like gasoline fumes—the color drained from his face.

  He shook his head slowly from side to side, and then stumbled into the wall, his eyes starting to bulge.

  I can breathe because of the water, she suddenly realized.

  Victor started to claw at his shirt and then fell to his knees.

  Deep below them, Abby heard an explosion.

  ****

  Dafne hurried through side door of the warehouse and locked it securely behind her. The coven had owned the warehouse for decades and, over time, it had slowly filled. In addition to Oliver's jeep, there were two black sedans rarely used by the elder witches of Ula. Abby's Cavalier occupied a corner next to Dafne's green Eclipse. There were boxes stuffed with clothes, books and memorabilia. Tall shelves held picture albums, television sets, appliances and toys. Every witch who entered the coven eventually abandoned their stuff to the warehouse.

  The warehouse stood in an isolated stretch of forest at the edge of Brimley, a small community bordering Lake Superior. The coven owned ten acres and the warehouse was tucked deep into the trees and surrounded by barbed wire fencing, which merely served as a deterrent. The repulsion spells truly kept the humans away.

  Dafne had left Ula hours earlier, unable to witness the unraveling of Abby for fear that Faustine or Elda would sense her involvement. She moved to the back of the warehouse and then took the metal stairs two at a time. Her stuff occupied a shadowy upstairs corner, far away from the other witches' belongings. Dafne grabbed a familiar black tote and pulled it across the floor. She hesitated and listened, once more checking that no one had followed her. Satisfied, she began the arduous process of ripping off layers of the duck tape that criss-crossed the container. She dropped it in sticky bundles and peeled back the lid, lifting out a heavy metal safe that she quickly dialed the combo into, despite having not opened it in more than thirty years.

  Inside a jumble of photos and papers greeted her. Not the fodder of most safes—no cash or expensive family heirlooms lay within the metal chamber, though there was one piece of jewelry, a small copper band with a reddish agate stone resting in its center. She lifted it out and slipped it onto her ring finger where it still fit perfectly. The pictures were not many, but only a glance and Dafne felt a hundred years vanish. Her hands began to shake as she touched the worn photos and her heartbeat grew so thunderous, she thought it might burst and end her suffering once and for all.

  His eyes were the same piercing black but, back then, in the days before the darkness claimed him, they had a luminous sheen. They shone with brilliance so intense that sometimes when they walked together in the sun, she could hardly look at him. He wore his hair long back then, held in place with a piece of soft leather at the base of his neck. She remembered brushing it, how the black silky strands flowed over her fingers like water. He worked on the water, a fisherman, and he always smelled of the dank scent of fish skins and seaweed. She would file the sand from beneath his fingers and they would eat fresh salmon, caught just that day, over a fire on the beach.

  In those days, she wasn't allowed to date really. Her minister father and prudish mother made clear to her at a young age what loose women did, which, of course, made her nighttime trysts all the more exhilarating. Dafne had known then that his appeal had nothing to do with rebellion. She loved him. She loved him from the first moment that he spoke, approaching her at the market in search of thread and needle for his trousers, which he'd snagged on a fishing hook the day before.

  He courted her, in the days after their first meeting, like the best lovers do. He brought her daisies from the woods and seashells from his fishing nets. He waited weeks to kiss her and even then, he planned it as if it were their first time making love. He lit candles and brought moonshine to his friend's little stone cottage. They cuddled by the fireplace and talked for hours and, when he finally tilted her face to meet his, she let go of everything that she'd kept for herself. Every wall she'd built between them, every secret she harbored, every defense that might have kept her at bay went like smoke in the chimney dancing into the dense night air.

  After that, the little cabin became their weekend retreat. 'Nannying the newborn twins across town,' she told her family when she raced from home at dusk. They made love on the thin cot beneath the windows, always open to the lake air. They also began to dream. They dreamed of leaving Trager and finding a big city somewhere. She would sell perfumes and oils and he would fish in the ocean, where real money could be made. They would send their families postcards of the exotic foods they ate and the languages spoken by their immigrant neighbors. New York was the place that they both held in their mind's eye, but they rarely uttered the name of the city. It was too real then and, tucked into the little cabin, their dreams still had wings. Neither of them felt ready to ground the fantasy.

  Dafne rotated the ring and looked at the agate stone. It had dulled over the years, but still revealed tiny waves of red and white. 'Lover's ocean' he had called it when he first gave it to her. He said that he had walked the beaches for days finding the perfect one. She imagined him sitting on the boat, polishing and filing the fine stone until it was a tiny round orb that he could fasten to the copper band. He bought the copper from her dear friend Aubrey, and Dafne had been happy then that her closest friend knew of Tobias's proposal. They had all been happy then, before the fire.

  Chapter 10r />
  August 5, 1908

  Aubrey heard the cri]es in her sleep and when she woke to the silent room, she felt her blood pulsing in her ears. Nothing rustled. The wind had died early that day and not even her curtains shifted in the midnight calm. She closed her eyes and went beyond her ears, probing for the sound that she knew roused her. It came then, a boy's cry, too meek to be audible, but Aubrey felt his anguish tremble through her. She hurried from her bed, threw on a shawl and sandals and ran into the forest.

  The trees around her home blocked the light of the moon, but Aubrey did not need to see the forest with her eyes. She moved swiftly around fallen trees and pockets of thorny bushes until the cries became more urgent and loud enough that her ears picked up the sound. She found him in a small clearing, his hands clutching his head and his small body tucked, as if in his mother's womb, on the leafy earth.

  "Solomon, Solomon" she whispered the boy's name calmly as she tried to gently pull his hands from his head.

  Solomon was the youngest child and only son of her closest neighbor, Jonas Herman. He lived just a half mile down the wooded track that ran to her cottage in the woods. The only boy amongst four sisters, Solomon knew an adventurous spirit and Aubrey often encountered him leaping through the woods in chase of some small rabbit or squirrel. He did not harm the animals, but merely watched and tracked them. He once told her that someday he would farm the land, but instead of chickens, he would raise coyotes.

  He looked at her now with a terror that made her blood grow cold. She lifted him into her lap easily, no longer surprised by her unnatural strength. She carried him cradled in her arms and, when they reached her cottage, she laid him in her own bed and covered him with a heavy wool blanket. He shivered despite the fever and his glassy eyes peered out from his sunken face.

  She fumbled through her herbs, commanding her trembling hands to steady and quickly mixed a poultice of arrow root, basil and caraway seed. She removed his blanket and rubbed his chest and neck first with warm sesame oil and then began to move the poultice across his skin. He writhed beneath the mixture, his face growing taut as his mouth yawned in a silent scream and Aubrey thought she saw a darkness too great in his gaping mouth to be merely the cavity for his teeth and tongue. He started to rock back and forth, his movements growing violent, and she had to lie upon him to keep him from leaping from the bed.

  For an instant, her vision traveled elsewhere and she saw her beloved Henry picking his way through the woods, his heavy boots getting caught in roots and branches. He stumbled and fell on one knee and laughed at his own clumsiness. Henry, not a witch and a rather klutzy human at that, did not have Aubrey's night vision nor her uncanny ability to navigate the Ebony woods with her eyes closed. He'd been gone for two days to Cadillac, a small lumbering town south of Trager where his brother worked as a doctor. Henry assisted his brother in the hospital and in return, his brother gave him free medical supplies for the small clinic that Aubrey and Henry had opened just six months before.

  In her mind, Aubrey could see Henry's leather bag nearly bursting and so she ran from the cottage. She did not call his name, for hearing her would only cause him to move faster and he would likely take a more painful spill. He felt her though and so hurried anyway, moving in the direction of her frantic energy.

  For three hours, they nursed the boy. Aubrey whispered incantations and commanded Henry to the mortar and pestle where he crushed and mixed until his hands were nearly numb. He had dumped his bag of medical supplies on the floor, but none of the medicine could remove the slithering dark that had entered young Solomon. At dawn another of their coven, Celeste, arrived and then Dafne and five more witches joined their cause. They linked hands and prayed around the boy, calling upon the energies of the earth and rocking from side to side as he too rocked with the power of the monster within him.

  When his eyes rolled back into his head and his breath took on the ragged death rattle, Aubrey ran to his father's cottage. The other witches cleaned quickly, shoving their remedies into cupboards before they retired to the woods to wait for their friend. They did not speak. They all knew and loved Solomon and releasing him to death brought them crashing down from the mountains they'd soared to in recent months as together their power grew. Had they failed him? Were they not as strong as they believed? No answers soothed them. They huddled in the dewy, morning woods watching the slanted light of the morning sun as it rose.

  They sat in a circle, their hands clasped and eyes closed and when the father's wails found them, they prayed to the source of all light that Solomon's young body be relieved of his suffering and his vibrant soul returned to his home. Aubrey joined them in silence, her brow knitted and her shoulders bowed beneath the weight of her long night.

  Chapter 11

  Abby thrust her arms beneath Victor and dragged. His head drooped and he felt heavy, as if weighted with cement bricks. Her eyes watered and ran and she started to taste blood as it seeped from her nose. The air was gone, replaced by something poisonous that rolled out from the walls in visible gusts. They had triggered something when they entered the cave and the explosions beneath her and the toxic gas only felt like the beginning. She stumbled and fell over a rock, losing Victor and slamming her head into the hard earth. She could no longer see, and waves of nausea and dizziness coursed through her. She remembered her previous rescue from the Vepar's lair when Faustine found her and Dafne in the ravine beyond the cliffs. She reached for him then, pushing her thoughts towards the castle, holding Faustine desperately in her mind. No images rose up and she felt sure that he could not sense her.

  Pressing up on her elbows, she gave one more futile attempt at finding her feet, but made it only to her knees before the floor beneath her cracked from some explosion in the belly of the cliff. She and Victor began to fall.

  ****

  Vesta woke with a gurgling scream, cut off by the rancid smelling palm of the Vepar Wrath. She could see the dirt caked beneath his fingernails and taste the metallic tinge of his last blood thirst. His black eyes did not look at her, but into the distance where the tiniest cloud of dust had begun to rise in the night sky. The ring on her hand pulsed vivid white, faded and then pulsed again. Since Tane's death, its power had changed and it no longer offered reliable signals when a witch moved close by. Now it flashed at strange moments, growing very hot or cold, and at times did nothing for so long that she started to doubt whether its color would ever change again. Tonight it spoke and Vesta knew that Tobias had been right.

  Wrath did not even seem to breathe and, after several minutes, Vesta shifted forward slowly, sitting up and then finding her knees. He did not look at her, but she felt his cold fury even as she drifted near him. He hated her, but not because she had foolishly allowed a relic to be created, which later led to the death of the Vepar Tony, but because he hated all things. Unlike most of the other Vepars, even the kill did not satisfy him. He moved through it with a slow, methodical determination that did not betray any joy or frenzy in the death of his victims, but a dead obedience to some devil that even she did not know.

  Vesta was devoted to Tobias. She did not attempt to understand the mind state of Tobias. His moods were like the pendulum's swing. In one moment, she felt the sick twist of love between them and at other times, he seemed to delight in her suffering. But those emotions she understood on the most basic human level. Even in the darkness, perhaps more so in the darkness, the animal hunger of emotion reigned supreme. No peace or tranquility existed within her or any other Vepar. Their choice to destroy and consume, betrayed their selfishness, but also their self-loathing. Did she not detest herself as fully as she hated the Vepar Tony whom she hated as much as the witch who murdered him? Did she not hate herself for loving Tobias as he slowly drained the life from her only sibling Tane, or for her weakness in allowing Tane to enter their dark world to begin with? She hated too how visibly she displayed her emotions. She felt Wrath recoiling from her as she trembled beside him.

  Every muscle
in her body longed to spring animal-like through the forest to the cliff edge where surely their screams could be heard by now. She licked her lips, relishing the thought of the tall blond one, Oliver, writhing in the pit of snakes, his blond hair rich with streaks of dark, coppery red.

  "Sit," the Vepar Wrath hissed at her and she realized that she had started to sneak forward onto her haunches, her nails digging into the dirt at her feet. She glared at him, so angry that he should command her that she longed to rip his throat out and drink his black blood. His eyes turned ever so slowly and locked on hers. She no longer hoped to hurt him at all, but merely to survive the next moment and the one after that.

  In his eyes, she was already dead and she felt her body lose its vitality and begin to wither and sink into itself. Then she felt the maggots and flies picking at her flesh, their tiny prickling feet on her swollen eyeballs and she tried to scream, but no voice lived in those wasted lungs. She reached up to claw at her rotted face, but the scene before her slid back into focus.. Wrath held her gaze and she turned away afraid that he might conjure the visions again, but he returned his focus to the cliff. Vesta fell back in the dirt and lay silent, staring at the starless sky.

  ****

  Oliver stood on the bank of the river below in shadow. He had watched Abby and Victor go into the cave with a sickness that he confused with guilt. When the explosions began he recognized the sensation for what it was—foreboding—and he bound up the cliff wall like an animal being hunted.