Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  Kendra grinned and looked at Victor who'd barely turned from the enormous flat screen computer monitor hanging in one side of the loft. Steel cables held it firmly in place. Victor's fingers flew across a large glowing tablet that hung below the monitor. On the screen, Abby watched different areas on a city grid lighting up.

  She had not seen Victor since the night that Oliver rescued them from the Vepar's lair. She had apologized to him for running, but he insisted that he understood. Abby did not intend to bring it up—at least, not right away.

  "So what does that mean?" Abby asked Kendra, following her into the open kitchen resplendent in black and stainless steel. "To be an Urban Guerilla Witch?" Kendra pulled them each shots of espresso.

  "Well," Kendra said, taking out a small frothing wand and adding steamed milk to their espresso. "It's all about motion in meaningful ways. Too many covens have become these petrified power centers. They're filled with ancient potent witches who have slowly withdrawn from society and all of their work happens within their coven instead of the world. We spare little, if any, energy on our group. We come and go as we please. There's no constant ritual keeping us together. Instead we expend our energy in communities that need it. We're also plugged into modern reality." She cocked her head toward the computer as she handed an espresso to Victor and Sebastian. "We use the internet, cell phones, tablets, GPS—you know, all that technology that witches think they're supposed to live without because of their superior intuition. It seems more like pride than productivity that lies at the heart of this refusal to participate in the world as it is now."

  "Exactly," Victor chimed in. "How can we do good in the world if we can't even communicate regularly at the most basic level. There are three year olds in contact with their cousins in Spain. We're an advanced species of witches and we can while away days sitting in a cave waiting for another witch to show up with information."

  Abby sensed that Victor and his group had spent a great deal of time trying to understand and define their purpose in the world. She appreciated it, but always felt a bit taken aback by any group that elevated themselves too high over others. Especially when the others had spent thousands of years creating the world that they believed in.

  "What about learning?" Oliver asked, intrigued. "How did you learn what you could do?"

  "How could we not?" Kendra retorted, smiling. "I started manipulating air when I was sixteen. I could shift storms before I turned twenty. But let me not pretend that we didn't have help. We were all discovered by elder witches tracking our blood lines."

  "I believe we'd have discovered it for ourselves, anyway," Victor said simply, turning away from the computer.

  "Maybe," Kendra said carefully, "but I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to make sense of it all."

  "We stand on the shoulders of giants," Oliver said, watching Victor's response.

  Abby knew that Oliver held a fierce loyalty to Ula, and specifically to Helena, for discovering him and introducing him to the coven. Victor's obvious disdain for the elder witches did not sit well.

  "Yes, exactly," Kendra jumped in, also sensing the rising tension. "Our progress has been greatly influenced by the witches who came before us and paved the way. Our tinctures alone are hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the making. To begin from nothing...well, I don't even want to think about it."

  Victor nodded, but returned to his tablet.

  "This is Chicago," he said pointing towards the screen. "We've created this grid so that we can see the separate areas where we're working. Everything from planting gardens, with a bit of magic of course, to opening free clinics for basic healthcare. Everything is run by residents, non-witches, but we use spells to bring it all together and ultimately hold it all together."

  "Urban farming?" Oliver asked, tuning into a video on the tablet of a giant community farm surrounded by high-rises. "I've been reading a lot about that. It looks like you guys have done a great job with it."

  "It's real," Victor said. "It's not hiding from the world and wasting decades chasing Vepars."

  "Not that those aren't legitimate too." Again Kendra kept the peace. "But we don't want to be reactionary and fear-based. We're trying to make a difference in real time, you know?"

  "Huh. It's great, but I'm curious then why you felt the need to take Abby back to that Vepar's lair? I mean if you're not interested in hunting them and all?" Oliver's acidic tone left Abby momentarily speechless.

  Kendra gave Victor a funny look, but said nothing.

  "That's a long story," Victor replied, looking apologetically toward Kendra. "And I didn't mean to insult you, Oliver."

  Oliver looked vaguely mollified.

  "I guess I'm still curious how you protect yourself and your community?"

  "The same instincts run in our blood that run in yours," Victor told him.

  Abby realized that Victor's pride may have been more injured in their late night outing than his body.

  "We do our best," Kendra interrupted him. She took his hand and slipped him a small turquoise stone.

  Abby recognized it—Amazonite. It was only one of the hundreds of stones that she'd sifted through at Ula, recording their properties and trying to experience their affects first-hand. When Sebastian had been acting strangely, she even tried putting Amazonite under his pillow to calm him and open the lines of communication.

  Victor did not look at the stone, but Abby noticed his hand tighten around it and then he nodded and gave her a little smile.

  "The truth is that we want to make a difference, that's it. We're like every other person stumbling around out there trying to find their purpose and improve the world some in the process."

  Abby nodded, agreeing completely. She wanted nothing more than to help in some way. She hadn't felt useless at Ula because she'd only just discovered her gifts months earlier, but another year or two and the status quo may have become an issue.

  Oliver rubbed his jaw. His eyes lit up with excitement and maybe even envy as he looked at the enormous digital grid, but she also saw his continued reluctance to get on board.

  "But you're not here to learn about us," said Victor. "You need help."

  "Yes, we do," Abby agreed. "We're in the middle of something that we can't quite understand and we need information."

  "That is our specialty," Victor told her, wiping his hand across the tablet so that the monitor showed only a blank white page and a small search box. "What are we looking for?"

  "A connection, or maybe a curse," Oliver began, grabbing his bag from the coat rack and pulling out several newspaper clippings. "It's at least one hundred years old and it originated, we think, in Trager. There's some kind of group up there who knows about witches and is writing about their findings and have been for a long time. We're trying to find out who they are and what this curse is all about."

  Kendra walked beside Victor and placed a hand gently on his back. He turned and kissed her lightly on the forehead and Abby felt a twinge of sadness. She could not afford to think of Sebastian in that moment—it hurt too much—but she found the pain, always dormant, waiting to rear its ugly head at the slightest show of affection.

  The elevator slid open and the other three witches, who Abby had met at Sorciére, ambled off. Their loud voices echoed around the apartment. They knew that Abby and Oliver would be there and had brought sustenance.

  "Pizza and beer," Dante chimed in his high feminine voice.

  Kendra cleared an enormous round coffee table and the witches gathered around it to eat and discuss. Abby and Oliver spoke first, explaining everything they'd learned and what they searched for. The other witches looked intrigued and excited. Only Victor appeared mysterious in his thoughts, his expression rarely giving him away. His secretiveness was not lost on Abby or Oliver.

  "I met Sebastian," Marcus said out of nowhere. "Only briefly but, yes, I remember him and you know, I did sense some cloak hiding him. I didn't probe it. He seemed very happy, Abby."

  He
smiled at her warmly and Dante squeezed his knee. She realized that they were lovers.

  "Where did you see him? Was he with anyone?"

  "By the wishing fountain," Marcus continued. "The one in the smaller Ballroom. When you dropped your wish in, a star floated up and imbedded in the sky overhead. It was really spectacular."

  "I saw the wishing fountain too," Oliver added, "but he wasn't there then."

  Abby took a drink of beer and closed her eyes tightly for a moment.

  "I know that his death..." her voice choked a bit at this word, "...is a part of this. I know it, but I don't understand how..."

  Ezra slid close to her and rubbed her shoulder gently. Abby struggled for a moment not to cry and then, with a long exhale, she released the grief clamoring for her attention.

  "Well, let's find out then, shall we?" Victor said. He called a voice command to the giant computer and it came back to life. From across the room he directed it to find any pieces of news from Trager City in the previous three months and then every piece of news from the year 1908. He then added a command that the computer intelligence system, which he referred to as Jax, find correlations. "While Jax is working on that, let's get started on this."

  He began grabbing boxes of paperwork and hauling them to the table. Abby and Oliver had brought many of the totes from Rod's crawl space, along with information that Abby had gathered from her mother's basement. Victor handed each person a box. Then he walked to a large silver drafting table, rolling up plans and stacking them on the side.

  "Find the links. You come across the same name, pile them together. Let's start to make sense of this."

  Oliver nudged Abby and smiled his approval. He'd been apprehensive about coming to Victor's apartment, especially after the incident with the Vepar caves, but he gave in when Abby insisted that they needed back-up, not to mention fresh eyes. She could see his relief at having help.

  The first hour passed and no one spoke. On the computer screen, words whizzed by, pages flashed and disappeared. At one point, Abby looked up and saw Devin's wide green eyes for only a moment before the photo vanished, replaced by a map and then another news article.

  She trudged through a box from her mother's basement that held family memorabilia. Photos lay strewn about, tucked between old receipts and greeting cards. When she passed a postcard, she almost passed it by, but the word 'curse' popped out at her as it had in Stephen's home. The postcard showed a Native American man, a medicine man perhaps, drawing images in the sky. On the back, only a single line was written. The curse is buried.

  ****

  Sebastian hoisted himself onto the tall loft bed at the very front of the house. It pressed against a wide window that looked out on the choppy waters of the sea. The white caps frothed and rolled over the gray rocky shore and, as he watched, he felt the first stirrings of familiarity. Not a memory per se, but a sense of calm that all of the mysteries of his life lived in such water and that, as he drifted off to sleep that night, some water nymph or magical sprite would come to his room and whisper the tales of his forgotten life. He felt sort of giddy at the thought and laughed out loud, not minding the sound of his voice as he lay alone in the bedroom. For the first time since standing on that deserted road, he did not feel lost, but found. As though the three people whom he had only met hours earlier genuinely did hold the key to the locked doorway of his mind.

  "Sebastian." He said his name and stared at a lighthouse perched at the end of a craggy pier beyond the house. "Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian." It didn't feel like it belonged to him, but then again, maybe it did.

  He heard the floors creaking in the hallway outside his room. The man named Rod called out 'good night' to his other house mates. Rod did not fit with the other two. His goofy demeanor had an edge. Rod harbored some kind of anguish, a grief that Sebastian sensed in his own heart when he turned the full light of his awareness towards it.

  ****

  Sebastian woke and fought the covers away from his neck. They seemed to be strangling him. The thick embroidered fabric felt heavy like the sand that Claire used to pile on top of him when they would go to the beach. She would dig a long hole and insist that he lay in it and then proceed to scoop plastic bucketfuls of sand onto his legs and torso and arms until only his head emerged from the shore. She must have turned the heat up in their apartment. He stumbled out of his bedroom and into the hallway, but then the hallway was gone and he realized he'd been sleeping on Sydney's couch. He stared up the stairway to where Abby slept. Photos lined the stairway wall and he looked at them quickly as he walked up to Abby's room. He could hear her crying and he pushed the bedroom door open, starting to step in, but caught himself just in the nick of time. Beyond the doorway, the world fell away. A hundred or more feet below, along a jagged rock cliff, water crashed. He teetered for a moment, grasping the wooden door frame and feeling it give, splinter, and then let go. He plunged into the starry night sky, arms and legs flailing, as the water rushed up to meet him.

  He woke in the house by the sea and again tore away covers and sheets, heaving them to the floor and stumbling down from the high loft bed, landing funny on his right leg so that his ankle twisted and he cried out in pain. Confusion and exhaustion coursed through him and, for a time, he grasped it all—Claire, Abby, the coven of Ula, All Hallow's Eve, Adora and Rod—and then he opened the doorway of his room and stood, not in a hallway, but in a dense, black forest. The leering face of Tobias stared back at him, his mouth rimmed with blood and a twisted figure at his feet. The figure kept changing, long red curls became Claire's short black bob and then Abby's baseball cap the morning that she found Devin's body. He stared at his own body writhing on the earth, black snakes coiling around his arms and legs. Now dozens of Vepars surrounded him and they chanted into the night sky, their arms rising in worship to some invisible demon. He turned from the image and the woods were gone, replaced by a cliff of wildflowers, and Abby stood in the center, her long brown curls blowing in a lake breeze and her smile like the sweetest honey. He ran across the field but, as Abby turned, he saw that it was not Abby at all, but Dafne, her dark eyes looking angry and her face twisted into a grotesque and hateful grin. She lifted a finger and pointed.

  Sebastian fell through a doorway and found he had somehow made it downstairs in the strange house he'd been brought to the day before. His hands and knees hit the cobblestone pathway outside of the front door and pain shot through his limbs. He crawled toward the water, sweat pouring down his face and dripping from his armpits. Dizziness and nausea wracked his body and he teetered to the side, landing in a barren thorny bush that clawed at his face. The bush held its shape, but the rest of the world shifted and now he lay on a soft blanket with surging lake water caressing the cliffs beneath him. He groaned with pleasure as Abby guided him inside her. She pressed her naked breasts against his chest and began to slide back and forth on top of him. He pulled her hips down and laughed as he came, but when he sought her sweet brown eyes, they'd been replaced by oozing black holes. Long flaxen hair flowed from the ghastly face of the monster than held him beneath her. He wrenched away from her and fell from the cliff edge, landing in a circle of fire. The Vepars again surrounded him. Their eyes held black glassy stares and their bloody lips moved in unison. Somewhere in the woods, a young boy cried, and then the cry became Claire's and he called out to her.

  Julian watched Sebastian and carefully stirred the boiling liquid that he had placed on the stove when he first heard the young man crash from his bed upstairs. Julian had only used the Anamnesis twice, but twice was enough. The concoction would aid Sebastian in his shock, but also begin to repair the damage done. To remove an entire memory took ancient magic, the sort of magic that, if done poorly, left lasting damage.

  Julian allowed Sebastian another half hour before he went to the beach to retrieve him. He did not intend cruelty by this delay, but understood the delicate mechanisms at work in Sebastian's mind. Julian knew that his own interjection would only pro
long the process. He found Sebastian near the water, his body tucked into a ball and his face wracked with grief.

  "Sebastian, come out. You're safe, you're safe," Julian told him, kneeling on the rocky shore and placing a warm water bottle against Sebastian's icy skin.

  Sebastian heard a disembodied voice from the sky and then from the darkness as the forest too fell away. He followed it out and back into the present where he lay on the beach and Julian's face loomed before him.

  He blinked wildly around, straining for breath, but struggling more to piece a lifetime back together. The blank mind afflicting him for the previous weeks had vanished. All of the pain and joy that had transpired to make him the man that he was slid back into place with the force of a hurricane. Tears poured from his eyes and he closed them and relished their salty taste. He had never been so grateful to remember the long tragic tale of his life.

  Chapter 24

  That night, Abby and Oliver walked the streets of Chicago and talked about their findings. The city had already begun its relentless pursuit of holiday buyers and every storefront held dazzling Christmas displays with elaborate trees and red-cheeked mannequins. Garland-wrapped street lamps lined the sidewalks and passersby huddled close to their loved ones, hats tucked tightly over their ears and hands shoved into their pockets. Despite the cold, the city was romantic, and Abby felt a smile curve her lips when they passed a man playing a saxophone along the Grand River. Oliver dropped several bills into his open case and took Abby's hand in his own.

  His warmth felt so good that she drifted in the fantasy of lovers strolling the haunted Chicago streets with no greater problem than whether to get cocoa or coffee that night.

  He spoke and her momentary reverie dissipated with the cold halo of his breath.

  "Do you feel like we're getting closer to this?"

  Abby considered his question, flashing back on the day's discoveries.