Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  She came to a stop in front of a set of French glass doors that opened into a cavernous bedroom. An enormous medieval bed stood beneath a copper chandelier, shaped like a many-pointed star. Colored light shone through the stained-glass window behind the bed and made rainbow patterns on the white comforter.

  "Shotgun this room," Abby said when Victor walked in behind her.

  "Wow, this is epic," he agreed, running his hand along the whorls and ridges of the bed frame. "It looks like a witch's bed."

  They both laughed, but it did.

  "What looks like a witch's bed?" Kendra asked. "Oh," she sighed. "It's gorgeous."

  "And spooky," Oliver added over Abby's shoulder.

  She elbowed him and laughed.

  "It's not spooky, just..."

  "Special," Sebastian finished. He moved in behind Abby and breathed into her hair. She pressed back against him.

  "Whoa, look at that bed," Lydie squealed sliding into the room on her own socked feet.

  They all laughed. Oliver scooped Lydie up and ran out. Abby heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs.

  "Whee," Lydie called.

  "Better catch them or Oliver's going to claim the second best bedroom," Victor joked, steering Kendra out of the room.

  Sebastian moved to the window and looked at the stained glass.

  "The Virgin Mary," he said, tracing the vague outline of a woman's shape in the reds and blues of the glass.

  Abby followed the line that his fingers drew, and slowly the shape emerged.

  "I didn't see it before," she said.

  "Neither did I,' he admitted. "But then as I stared at it, she started to emerge. A good sign, I think. My mother always loved the Virgin Mary. She wore a little silver amulet with an inscription of Mary around her neck."

  "Was your mother religious?" Abby asked, surprised.

  Sebastian smiled and Abby saw the look of happy memories in his eyes.

  "No, raised Catholic though, so she had a handful of superstitions. Her mother gave her the charm and she would have given it to Claire, but..."

  "She was wearing it when she died?"

  "I assume so. The truth is I don't know. I never saw it again after her death. I searched our house, but by then we were moving and everything was in boxes. I ripped the place apart, but no necklace."

  Abby lifted Sebastian's hand to her lips and kissed it softly.

  "I wish I could have known them-your parents and your sister too, Claire. I think in all of this, that is my only regret, that I met you after they were already gone."

  Sebastian tucked a wayward curl behind her ear and kissed her.

  "I wish that too."

  ****

  Elda stood in front of the huge mirror and waited for the familiar sheen to slide down the reflective surface. They had bewitched it again, with the help of the Sorciére witches, into a two-way glass; however, it only transformed for two hours every first Friday. She saw the shift as the glass undulated before her.

  As she began to walk through, Elda closed her eyes to avoid the dizziness that sometimes befell her. She stepped into the Coven of Sorciére's castle, into a small sitting room rarely used by the Sorciére witches. Galla had felt it prudent that the mirror remain secret from the coven, other than those witches directly involved in the happenings at Ula.

  Elda steadied her hand against a tall chair and then sat down, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. The transition through time and space had begun to take a toll on her, and she noticed more and more a feeling of vertigo when she made the journey.

  The room was cold and dark except for a single lamp. The shade, hung with gold fringed tassels, trembled with Elda's movement into the room. She watched the shadows that the light cast on the floor and she remembered how enthralling she had found shadows as a young girl. She drove her parents mad with the elaborate monsters she envisioned in those dark shapes. In those days, candles illuminated everything and shadows were much more dynamic and, in her mind, sinister.

  "You've arrived," Galla observed as she slipped through the doorway, holding a mug of tea. "I prepared a tonic for you. Faustine mentioned that you've been feeling a bit ill during the passage?"

  Elda took the cup and sipped the sweet gingery tea.

  "Yes, each time a bit more, it seems. Apparently I'm not sixteen anymore."

  Galla chuckled and nodded her agreement. "Tell me about it."

  "So have there been any findings?" Elda asked. She wanted to sit and relax and chat with Galla about trivial things, but her instincts told her that Galla had something to share.

  "Yes, but not here. Let us go to my private chamber."

  Elda did not ask more. There was only one reason Galla would prefer to speak in her private room: a need for secrecy.

  Galla took a series of hallways and Elda soon lost track of their movements.

  "Through here," Galla said at last, stopping at a heavy door adorned with a brass cat's face. Galla took a slender skeleton key from her pocket and clicked open the lock.

  "You lock your door?" Elda asked, surprised.

  "A coven decision," Galla told her. "After the attack on Ula, we've been reinforcing on all fronts. In truth, I think the news about Indra is what did it. If one of our own is capable of deceiving us, then we must protect ourselves from the enemy within as well as without."

  Galla spoke with reluctant decisiveness. Only when they closed the door behind them, did she continue.

  "I am less than thrilled about the changes," she told Elda. "But there is a sense of mutiny in the air. I am trying to put on a unified front even if my heart isn't in it."

  Elda surveyed Galla's space. It was an apartment more than a room. Chunky old-world furniture was arranged in a sitting area next to a window that revealed an orange and pink sky as the sun began its descent. A kitchenette held tea things and sparkling wine goblets. One corner of the room overflowed with plants and a towering glass cylinder turned slowly, herbs poking from hydroponic pods. Another space revealed a claw-footed desk. The surface was perfectly clear except for a circle of crystals arranged around a single white candle. Beneath the desk, stacks of books rose from the floor.

  "More tea?" Galla moved to the kitchenette and took an additional mug from the cupboard.

  "Coffee?" Elda asked, the disorientation from her travel through the mirror still lingering. The tea had helped, but something strong and dark seemed in order.

  "Of course." Galla smiled and waved her hands over their mugs. She set a sugar bowl and pitcher of cream on the little round table.

  "Why is there upset in your coven, Galla? Because you're helping us?" Elda asked, settling into a chair and adding a drop of cream to her cup.

  "It is the whispers mostly. Word has spread about your human Sebastian and how he disappeared from our All Hallow's Ball. There are rumors of a meeting."

  "A meeting?"

  "Oh, it's the same old stories. The Ancients will come together and pass judgment. They will seek to restore the old ways."

  Elda cocked an eyebrow at Galla, who smiled an apology.

  "There are witches who still believe in The Ancients? This is not the fifteenth century. Even if we did have such a group, they surely wouldn't cast judgment on their own." Elda spoke, but a shiver ran down her spine.

  The Ancients were a bit like a fundamentalist version of God to early witches. It was they who created the rules to harm none and they who served punishment to witches that disobeyed. However, Elda had never known a living witch who saw or spoke with an Ancient. They existed in much the same way that God existed for humans, an all-seeing eye who tallied one's sins and eventually balanced the scales.

  "I know," Galla agreed, waving her hand in dismissal. "I've seen too much of the world to discount any story as total fiction, but I do not believe The Ancients, if they exist, are lurking in the shadows waiting to punish us for our misdeeds. Furthermore, there was no malice in the actions of Ula. You merely tried to help a new witch feel welcome by allowing he
r human lover to be a part of her life. It seems to me that our role as witches should be more about inclusivity than superiority."

  "I agree completely. Alienating ourselves is exactly why the Vepar's attack was so shocking. We were unprepared. We lived like hermits in our castle on the cliff and assumed that we could go on doing so forever. I wonder why we never asked if we should continue that way."

  Galla drank her coffee, appearing thoughtful.

  "Looking back is always easier. We see the whole picture instead of fragments. Are we meant to stumble blindly along in this life? I don't know, but perhaps, yes. We get the glory of these bodies and this decadent earth, but we have to view the world through a pinhole. Everything comes in sips when we want to open wide and swallow the whole thing."

  Elda nodded, remembering. She had abstained so often. She loved Faustine, but she had spent decades in a chaste, distant love with him. She rarely indulged. Even her magic was carefully moderated. Perhaps her reluctance to tap into her wild self arose from her pre-witch life. As a girl in Croatia, more than two hundred years before, she lived in poverty and destitution. Luxuries simply did not exist. It was not a matter of abstaining, but surviving. Long after she discovered her powers and moved to Ula, she continued to wake at night hearing her baby brother's hungry cries. He died at only ten months old. Their mother's milk had dried and the food that she could provide was not nutritious enough to sustain him. For decades, Elda devoted her work as a witch entirely to feeding the poor. She planted magic gardens, she filled empty pantries with food to last through famines, and she nursed the malnourished to a thriving health that they had never known. Somewhere through the years, her need to save others to make up for her brother's death had dwindled.

  "Sometimes I feel very old," Elda sighed, inspecting a strand of her long silvery hair.

  Galla smiled and shook her head.

  "You are still a spring chicken, my dear," Galla reassured her. "It is I who am old."

  Elda gave her a wry smile. "Well, older than me, anyway."

  They laughed and then Galla set her coffee down, looking serious.

  "Your Abby is with child," Galla revealed, watching Elda carefully. "I feel confident that your coven is not aware?"

  Elda widened her eyes in surprise.

  "Just now? We saw her only last week. Surely I would have..."

  "She's hiding it," Galla interrupted.

  "How do you know?"

  "I still have her hair," she confessed. "I didn't take it intentionally. Thomas must have slipped it into my coat that day in the car when we found Abby injured. I discovered it when I returned here and tucked it into a drawer."

  "Why didn't you throw it away?" Elda asked.

  "I don't know. It just felt right to keep it, with everything that's happened. Hair is a direct link. It's a better conduit than material items. I hated to discard it only to discover a need."

  Elda understood, but also found Galla opening that portal disturbing. Mostly because it hurt to think that Abby had withheld such important news from the Coven of Ula.

  "Maybe she just wanted to wait until she felt sure. Many women miscarry and after Abby's injuries..."

  "Perhaps," Galla agreed. "But there's another presence around Abby. I'm sure it's the spirit Kanti. I can feel her through Abby. I think that I can feel her through Abby's child."

  Elda frowned.

  "How could that be?"

  "I don't know, Elda. This whole situation has confounded me on more levels than I care to admit, but we need to keep a close eye on her."

  Chapter 11

  Dafne tried to stand, but her left leg had been injured. Pain shot through her body and sent her crumpling back onto the bed. She groaned and bit down on a wad of blood-hardened blanket to keep from crying out. Dafne had felt pain. Sometimes her whole life felt like a series of monumental pains separated by years of listless monotony. Watching her friends die in the Ebony Woods fire, giving birth to the child she never knew, assisting Ula in its steady demise, remembering Tobias before he became a monster, and then knowing him after. At times, she thought all of the pain would take her swiftly in her sleep. When the nightmares became too much to bear, death would surely save her, but no, she lived on. Decades passed, but life never got sweeter; a little less bitter maybe, but then came the prophecy and with her growing awareness of the curse, a new pain consumed her life. She lived in terror for the witches of Ula. She owed them the shred of life she did claim and wanted only to protect them.

  But what had all of her scheming brought her? A broken body, held captive in some dungeon that felt as dark as the center of the earth. She never heard a sound. Not a whisper. It nearly drove her mad. Sometimes she talked to herself out loud, sang even, but water did not come enough to allow for frequent speaking. The water only appeared after she had slept and she knew that they drugged it with their venom, but she had to drink. Drink or die.

  Without light, she had no concept of night or day or how long she had been held prisoner. It might have been days or months. Where did they take Indra? Did she live? Or had they killed her and consumed her powerful blood?

  Had the curse come to fruition and Sebastian risen as the next Vepar in Alva's clan? Perhaps her ignorance about what occurred, beyond her four walls, bothered her more than anything else. In the cell, she had no control. When she tried to call upon the fire of the earth, it did not heed her call. She wanted to believe they'd merely locked her in some chamber that blocked access to her element, but then she considered The Pool of Truth and wondered if the gods had stripped away her powers for good.

  ****

  "Weird," Lydie murmured as they walked through an alley in the French Quarter, past a shop filled with tiny macabre heads hanging from strings.

  "The shrunken heads of New Orleans," Oliver sang eerily.

  "Hilarious," Abby quipped.

  Even in daytime, the New Orleans streets throbbed with the sounds of jazz music. Intoxicating smells wafted from every store and restaurant.

  Abby pointed out a two-story cafe called Silver Moons.

  "Let's eat there, I see a sign for jambalaya."

  "Do you think of anything other than food?" Oliver joked.

  "Yes," Abby retorted, blushing and hoping that Oliver wouldn't notice. She might have been able to hide her pregnancy, but the symptoms not so much. Between hunger and fatigue and weird bursts of not-intentional magic, she felt pretty sure that her witch counterparts were starting to notice that something was up.

  "I'm hungry too," Lydie said, in her defense. "And you ate half a bag of trail mix on the way here," she reminded Oliver. "No wonder you're not hungry."

  "An acute observation, Lyds; food it is." He laughed. "You two get a table. I'm going to drop into this bookstore and have a look around."

  Oliver wandered into a small, used bookshop that looked rather uninviting. Black ragged curtains covered the windows and a porcelain cat, who appeared somewhat hostile, guarded the door.

  Though they all agreed that Lydie needed the road trip, they also decided not to involve her in seeking out the L'Obscurite. Oliver had explained to Lydie who they were, but then made it clear that she got to skip the witch interrogation. Abby thought she might insist on going along, but then Oliver promised to take her to the zoo and she gave in.

  Victor, Kendra and Sebastian volunteered to search for the L'Obscurite while Oliver and Abby took Lydie sightseeing. Though Abby would have preferred to explore New Orleans with Sebastian, Victor insisted he go with them. He thought a human addition to their group might make the L'Obscurite less suspicious.

  Abby picked a table on the balcony and she and Lydie ordered sweet tea.

  Their waiter, a short gentleman dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck, told them enthusiastically about the specials. When he learned that they were visiting, he launched into a verbal tour of New Orleans, recommending a dozen or more restaurants and shops that they had to see before the left.

  "Thank you, Abby," Lydie said
seriously, after their waiter left.

  "For what, Lydie?" Abby asked, mystified. All she had done was pass Lydie a piece of bread.

  "For bringing me here and for letting Oliver and me stay with you. I know it's probably not as fun with a kid along."

  "That is absolutely not true," Abby assured her, squeezing Lydie's hand across the table.

  Lydie, not entirely comfortable with any displays of affection, pulled it quickly away.

  "We love having you. Honestly after you and Oliver stayed at Ula, Sebastian and I both felt a little lost. Our house is so big. It felt empty without you."

  Lydie offered a shy smile and tore her napkin into bits. When she finished that, she started staring at the ice cubes in her glass, causing them to melt.

  "See those candles over there?" Abby asked, giving Lydie a conspiratorial smile and tilting her head toward several tall candelabras along the balcony edge. "Think you could light them?"

  Lydie looked at the candles and grinned.

  "Easy as pie," she said, looking determined.

  Abby knew they shouldn't play with magic, in public no less, but after months of being serious, she wanted to have a little fun.

  Lydie gazed at the candles. Her fingers twitched on the table. One by one the candles lit. Another restaurant guest noticed as well. He looked at the floor as if searching for an electrical cord. A waiter stopped and loaded a tray with several empty glasses. When he stood, not realizing the candelabras had been lit, he stepped too close to the flame and his bowler hat caught on fire. Oblivious, the man continued cleaning. Abby stood quickly and flicked a surge of energy toward the half-empty pitcher of water on the table before him. The water spewed out and soaked the waiter and the couple at the next table, who both yelped in surprise. As if on cue, a cascade of red peony flowers showered the waiter and the couple from the sky. All three of them stared around in total astonishment, looking at one another with a mingling of awe and suspicion.