Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  "So what happened with Adora then?"

  "Well, Sydney brought her to the cottages and she performed some parade magic, she called it, to convince us of her legitimacy. She created a lightning storm and then she flew into one of the trees and made all the leaves turn purple. Nothing too brilliant according to her, but let me tell you, my whole life changed that night. I suddenly saw the world as it is really is, this insane mystery. All my doubts died in an instant. Of course that meant a whole new level of fear too, because now there was real evil in the world and I was a part of defending against it in my own little way, which scared me for Ebony and for the others."

  "And where are the others now?"

  Gwen closed her eyes.

  "I don't know where Stephen and Lorna are. Their homes were abandoned and none of us have heard from them in weeks. Karl and Meghan took Ebony..."

  "Why didn't you go?"

  "Because of you."

  Abby slowed and pulled off to the side of the road, turning to face Gwen.

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Stephen found something important a few weeks ago and he wouldn't explain it over the phone, but he told me that you, Abby, are the next in line. That's it, that's all he said, but I knew what he meant. You're the next in line for the curse."

  Chapter 28

  Oliver stood on the shore and looked into the choppy, gray waters of Lake Superior. The path he had swum to the castle a thousand times before lived in his muscle memory but, without Helena's pepper plants, he couldn't make the swim in the bitter November weather. He didn't feel cold, he rarely did. His body naturally ran hot and, even on the most frigid of nights, with snow piling around the castle, he'd often gone for barefoot walks and marveled at how the snow melted away from his feet. Small, seemingly irrelevant memories kept coming back to him. He remembered how Lydie used to demand to sit in his lap at breakfast while grumpily munching her cereal in the years after her parents' deaths. She rarely spoke then and when she did, her words held an accusatory edge for everyone, but him.

  The winter sun shone its pale light on the water and reflected the almost cloudless sky above. If he looked hard at the water, he could see Lydie in it. The look on her face terrified him—a look that had woken him in the dead of night and signaled that something felt terribly wrong and he had to return to Ula.

  Now he fought the urge to dive into the icy waters and sprint to the island. It was faster, but not safe. So he searched the shore until he found the row boat discarded by Abby weeks before. As he cut through the rough waters, he felt the tiny shiver of the spells cast around Ula, but they barely registered. The spells never blocked him, nor did they appear to him as they did to strangers. He'd helped place them, after all. However, they usually jolted him. When he passed through the barrier, he normally felt a mild electric shock. Today he felt nothing.

  He came into view of the castle, but still he did not feel Faustine. He moved through the tunnel into the island lagoon and sprang from the boat to the dock.

  The emptiness surrounding the castle was palpable and Oliver's world rolled. He looked at the earth, still steady beneath him, and realized he felt the energy of what had moved in that space. Oliver bolted up the steps and met the castle door with a hard thud. Not only locked, the door had been sealed and when he struck it, a shock blasted him away and he sprawled on the stone terrace. He ran around the side of the castle, jumping onto one of the tiny stone ledges that barely left room for his toes. He scaled the castle wall, glancing down when the ground fell away and was replaced by jagged cliffs plummeting to the roiling water below. He moved slowly along the edge. He would likely survive a fall, but wasn't in the mood to find out. When he finally made it around to the dining room balcony, he bounded over the small stone railing and raced to the door where again he struck some kind of electric shield that tossed him away. He was ready for it this time and landed on his feet.

  He started to yell and then to scream, waving his arms and hoping that someone within would see him. No faces appeared behind the dark windows. He kicked the stone railing until it began to break apart and started to fling the pieces. He grabbed the first chunk and threw it at the library window where it jerked away before touching the glass. Three more hunks of stone met the same resistance. Only when he threw a piece as high as he possibly could muster, at one of the tiny windows in Faustine's tower, did he connect. He heard the ping as the stone struck glass.

  Carefully channeling the adrenaline that coursed through him, he started up the tower. The stones had few spaces between them and even fewer cracks in which to wedge his feet, so Oliver plastered his body flat against the wall using his palms to suction the face of it while squeezing with his arms and legs around the curve of the turret. Within minutes, his entire body ached from the exertion, and the sweat breaking out on his body, made the stone slippery and harder to hold. Halfway up the tower, he started to lose his grip. His inner thighs spasmed and he closed his eyes, clenching back the images of the rocks far below him. He could survive a lot, but a thousand foot fall onto pointed slabs of granite would likely kill him.

  He started to yell again, hating to waste any bit of energy, but realizing with a cold certainty that he would never make the window. He clenched his eyes shut and instead started to move back down the tower. Every time he inched lower, his whole body started to lift away from the castle wall. He froze, clinging to the tower and trying desperately to find Faustine with his mind. When he could hold it no longer, he again started his descent but, as s he shifted down, his legs went slack and he began to fall. Despite his connection to the stone wall, his powers failed him. He flailed his arms and legs, screaming as the rocks rushed up to meet him, but an instant before impact, he felt something slow him down. His body began to float lazily upward. As he passed the terrace outside the dining area, he saw Elda, her face purple with strain. She reached out, took hold of his arms and pulled him to her and then she collapsed.

  Oliver could not stand. He lay next to an unconscious Elda and then slowly moved onto his hands and knees. He vomited, feeling his stomach churning sourly, and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve, before standing and gently lifting Elda into his arms. The door to the dining area stood open and he walked through hesitantly, not entirely sure they wouldn't both be blasted away.

  Inside the castle, an eerie silence greeted him. He did not call out, but laid Elda gently onto a rug and moved into the main hallway. Only some of the candles flickered, casting the hall in shadows, which taunted him as he searched for movement along the corridor. He tried to feel the presence of the other witches, but found only a great void.

  He went first to the library and then to the kitchen. He raced up the tower in search of Faustine, but every room lay empty. He finally moved into the dungeons, and there he heard the first sounds of life. Voices rang out from the Healing Room.

  He burst through the door and both Faustine and Max swung around to face him. Their hands and clothes were matted with blood and sweat ran down their faces in streams. Faustine looked wild-eyed and Max on the edge of defeat.

  "Oh, you're okay. Thank the heavens that you're okay," Max said, wiping a bloody hand across his forehead.

  Oliver began to ask who they were tending to and then he spotted Helena on the bed just beyond them.

  She looked so pale that he recognized her only by her auburn hair streaked a coppery brown. She rested on her stomach, her face turned towards him and clenched with pain though she didn't appear to be conscious.

  "What happened?" He moved to her side, grimacing at the open wounds that streaked across her back. Several of them continued to ooze blood while others emitted different colors. One especially deep gash, released a grayish puss.

  "We were invaded," Faustine said grimly, gently mopping Helena's skin with a damp cloth. She moaned in her sleep and shifted, but did not wake up.

  "Something got into the castle. It appears that she fell on some tinctures, poisonous tinctures," Max's voice broke as he t
alked. He returned to the long table of herbs, hurriedly mixing another in what appeared to be, twenty or thirty poultices that were already soaked in Helena's blood. He handed the satchel to Faustine who placed it on her wounds.

  "Where's Lydie?" Oliver demanded. He swept around the room searching under the beds as if she might be hiding there, though he knew in his heart he would not find Lydie anywhere in the Healing Room or in the castle.

  "We don't know." Faustine spoke so quietly that Oliver almost missed it. "We've searched the entire castle..." He placed his hands on the edge of Helena's bed and stared down at her. Oliver sensed how far he'd fallen and, though his guts screamed at him to be angry at Faustine, his heart could not.

  "Elda saved me upstairs. I nearly died trying to scale the building. Now I, at least, understand why. If Lydie has been taken, who is out looking for her?"

  "We arrived less than an hour ago, Oliver. Elda was resealing the castle while we..." He gestured at Helena.

  "Where are Bridget and Dafne?"

  "Bridget left more than a week ago to stay with her daughter in Florida and Dafne..." Faustine closed his eyes for a moment. "She's been missing for several days."

  ****

  "I went to the loft earlier this week. I planned to tell you everything, but you weren't there," Gwen told Abby.

  "I have all of the Asemaa's journals. You can read them. I'm not sure if there's much in there that might help. A lot of times it seemed like we chased pointless leads. One thing appeared important and then would just fizzle out. You see, we had information about that horrible fire in Ebony Woods. And you know what? If I'd known about that fire I never would have named my child Ebony. I feel foolish now because I love the name and, to tell you the truth, Sydney picked it, but later when Sydney showed me the newspaper clippings about Aubrey Blake and then we discovered all those other people died, I just felt like I'd cursed my own child."

  "It is a beautiful name," Abby said, remembering her mother mentioning Sydney's hope to someday have a daughter and name her Ebony. "I'm sure that you blessed her with that choice and nothing else."

  Gwen smiled thankfully and continued. "In the months before Sydney left for vacation, we met every single week. Stephen told us he found a lead and scheduled a trip to Houston to meet this person. I know he told Sydney more about it, but I missed the meeting with him before his trip. Sydney knew something, Abby. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that she didn't foresee her own death."

  "What? How?"

  "Again a dream. She had such vivid dreams and, a lot of times, they turned out to be true though you couldn't see it until later. About two weeks before she left, she told me she dreamed again of your grandmother, but this time, Arlene and your grandfather and all of these people from Sydney's life who had died were hugging her and saying Welcome."

  For a moment, Abby felt all of it. She felt the deaths of Sydney and Sebastian, the strange undulating powers coursing through her like an electric current, the fear and awe of the woman beside her, the knowledge that Sydney was not alone and so neither would be Sebastian. For him on the other side, were Claire and his parents and untold other loves that she had never learned about in her short span of time with him. She felt fully how unfair it was and yet how, as Elda said, beautifully orchestrated.

  "Tell me about the curse."

  ****

  Oliver stood in the doorway of Lydie's room, unable to walk in. The room's enormous bay window let in a flood of sunlight that washed everything in color and made Lydie's room look too happy and sparkly to be real. His eyes scanned the books and stuffed animals tossed on the window seat and the yellow beanbag chair with the dents of her body still pressed into the surface. Her bed was unmade with the turquoise gem bedspread shoved halfway down and her fuzzy big foot slippers on her pillow as if she slept with her feet at the top of the bed.

  A soft mewling came from Lydie's closet. He strode across the room and got down on his knees, pushing aside clothes and old discarded books. In the back of the closet, Lydie's new kitten, Garfield, peeked out from Lydie's old doll house, a toy that Max had laboriously carved for Lydie's seventh birthday. Though she never admitted to playing with the house, everyone in the coven knew that she loved it and now, years later, Oliver could see where her toys had scraped the perfectly sanded wooden floors and her play dough had gotten stuck in the tiny furniture.

  "Hi, Garfield," Oliver cooed, pulling the kitten out gently and holding it against his chest.

  Faustine entered the room behind him and stood silently.

  "I have thrown the Ink of Revealing into the sky and there is a clear path away from here. It is going south and likely fading every minute," he said finally.

  Oliver set the kitten down and stood abruptly.

  "We should leave at once," Faustine told him.

  "I think that I should go alone. Elda and Max are not safe here with Helena in such bad shape. I can find her and bring her back."

  Faustine shook his head no, but then Elda came in behind them, her face revealing that Helena had turned for the worse.

  "She's slipping away. I can't seem to bring her back." Her face was pinched with worry and Faustine seemed to come to a decision.

  "Fine then, go now, but you must keep contact. There are fresh medallions in the library—take two of them. Place one around your neck, close to your heart. I should be able to feel you that way."

  Oliver left quickly, grabbing the medallions and racing out to the dock where Faustine's small Boston Whaler sat ready. Overhead he could see streaks of silver in the sky. The silver illuminated the dark energy that had entered the castle and then escaped back across the water.

  ****

  "The curse began more than two hundred years ago, maybe longer. We know of only two hundred years and not all that much about those. What we think is that approximately every one hundred years a new witch somehow triggers this curse. What we know about the last time is only that there was a loose coven of young witches in Trager in nineteen hundred and eight. Aubrey was one of them and there were probably five or more others. We've struggled to track them all. One witch, her name was Dafne, drew the curse. She had a human lover called Tobias and you may have heard of him because he is now a Vepar."

  "What did you just say?" Abby asked stunned. "Tobias was Dafne's lover?"

  "You know him then? And her too? We thought she may have died in the fire..."

  Abby placed her palms together, as if in prayer, and held them to her lips. She suddenly feared for Oliver and the others at Ula.

  "She did not die. But please tell me all of it. I need to know everything that you know."

  "I'm not sure where the curse came from or even how we know about it exactly. Dafne and this Tobias meant to run away together, but instead he used his connection with Dafne to become a very powerful Vepar. In order to make this transition, he had to harness the power of many witches, which meant they had to die. We all thought Dafne probably had to die too, but now you're saying she's alive so I guess we didn't understand that part. Somehow Tobias burned all of them in the Ebony Woods. What we know is that this also happened in eighteen hundred and eight in Trager to a witch named Milda."

  Milda? The name rang familiar and Abby frowned trying to remember. Had she met a Milda at All Hallow's? No - where then? It came to her slowly and with horror. Elda had been sitting in the library describing the sad tale of a witch seduced by black magic only after being deceived by her human lover, The Lourdes of Warning.

  "You know of her too?" Gwen asked.

  "Worse," Abby mumbled, trembling at the memory of the wasted body in her self-made prison beneath the earth.

  "This doesn't apply to me," Abby said suddenly. "My...person, my lover—he died."

  The color drained from Gwen's face.

  "Not Sebastian? Sebastian died?"

  Abby closed her eyes at the sound of his name and nodded.

  "Yes."

  Gwen hung her head.

  "I can't believe it. I don't w
ant to."

  "You knew him?" Abby asked.

  "Only through Sydney." She looked far away suddenly, remembering. "I spent a lifetime hearing stories about him and his sister from Sydney, looking at pictures. The way his family died and then Claire. Oh, it's wrong how much heartache can be visited upon one life."

  A horn startled them and Abby looked up as a large hay truck passed dangerously close to the car. The driver's face glowered at them and then he disappeared in a puff of exhaust. Gwen jumped and then laughed, embarrassed.

  "I get spooked pretty easy these days," she said.

  "Yeah, me too," Abby replied, turning the car back on and pulling onto the road.

  "So who knows about this curse? The Vepars? Do they know? Does Tobias know?"

  Gwen glanced nervously out the window and shook her head.

  "I don't know. I wish Stephen were here. He was better at this. He took it really seriously like Sydney. I'm just...I'm just a part of it. I never really meant to be, but I am, and Stephen's been investigating disappearances for the last three months. At least ten, but maybe more people who have just vanished. Some of them were wanderers, vagrants, and so they mostly went unnoticed, but a few had families, husbands, wives, kids. Stephen was onto a lot that I didn't know about."

  "We went to Stephen's, my friend and I, and it looked like he left. It didn't look like someone took him," Abby said, trying to soothe Gwen.

  "Did Stephen say he thought the Vepars were behind the missing people?"

  "Yes. I mean he didn't say that, but yes. He wouldn't have made a point of calling to tell me about it otherwise. He also thought that someone was following him. This all happened within weeks of Devin's murder. Everything got really bizarre and scary."

  "Had it ever been scary before? Did you ever suspect that the Vepars knew of the Asemaa?"

  "No. Even after I met Adora and knew that all of the stories were true, I still felt removed from it. If I'd have thought that we were in real danger, I would have stepped away from it for my child's sake. I would never knowingly put Ebony at risk and now..." Gwen stammered and reached unconsciously for the small gold rose around her neck, "...now I'm afraid I've done exactly that."