Earth

by Shauna Granger

  “Why do you think he’s in a relationship?” Steven asked, rejoining the conversation.

  “Because, where they’re doing their rituals, you’d have to really trust a guy to go into the woods at night with him and it says the final sacrifice has to enter the circle of her own free will, so he’s not kid-napping anyone or taking a first date out there.” I was pacing again.

  “So why is the weather screwed up?” Steven asked.

  “Because the first minor sacrifice is just to do a blood offering to open the gates and it warns that opening the gates between planes or worlds may disrupt this world and weather abnormalities is a common result when you disrupt the different planes,” I explained.

  “Yeah, and it says once the offer has been accepted the disruption should subside because whoever answers would have entered through the gates and they will be shut once again,” Jodi said, translating from the spell.

  “So we’ll just have a demon spirit roaming around?” Steven asked.

  “No, he’ll possess the caster and share his body until they seal the ascension with the final blood sacrifice,” Jodi explained.

  “So when the storm stops we’ll know if a demon accepted?” Steven asked. His voice was steadier now.

  “Well, I dunno. Shay? I mean, maybe they’ll close if the offer is rejected,” Jodi offered.

  “Even if it’s a very minor demon that answers, one will. Black magic is the easiest to perform and any demon or devil would answer him. It’s too tempting, like selling your soul. They always accept,” I said, shaking my head.

  “So, how long is it supposed to take before you get an answer?” Steven asked, looking to Jodi, who scanned the spell again.

  “Three days, at most.”

  “Of course,” I said sarcastically. “How original to take yet another element from us and pervert it. Whatever.” I shook my head, clearing my mind. “Well today would be the third day, so that’s probably why the weather turned so violent. I’ll bet money the storm is over tomorrow.”

  “You think the weather will go back to normal?” Jodi asked skeptically.

  “No, not normal, but I’ll bet the flooding subsides and the rain lets up.” I walked over to my window and pulled back the curtains. The rain was still coming down in torrents; a few thick branches had broken away from our trees and were littering the ground. I stared up at the gray, rolling clouds, willing them to open up to perfect blue skies that a Southern California October usually had. “If he succeeded, if he’s answered, this will stop at Midnight.”

  “How do you know?” Steven asked.

  “The witch’s day begins at noon so it ends and begins both in light. Someone like this finds power in the dark. His day would begin and end at Midnight, always in darkness.” And that explained the cliché black candles and midnight spell work. “He’ll attempt the third sacrifice on Friday because that was the same night he tried to do the first sacrifice. Technically at midnight Friday night is Saturday and that’s traditionally the day for casting for physic attack and black is a power color.” I started laughing, but even to me it sounded wrong, like breaking glass. “It’s all so obvious and cliché I cant believe we didn’t pick up on it sooner!”

  Jodi’s face had contorted with anger, like she too realized how simple this was to see before we’d found the spell. “How could we have missed all this?”

  “If you want to hide something, you put it out in the open where no one will think to look for it.”

  My dad took Steven and Jodi home in his big truck pretty quickly after we’d found the spell. My parents were getting worried about the water level in the roads and wanted to get them home before it would be impossible to drive. I sent them both home with spell books to do some research on combating demons and sending them back to Hell without the aid of a priest or pastor. I was sitting in my armchair again staring out the window. I had pulled back the curtains to watch the storm and as night fell it seemed to grow in intensity, if that was possible. I had decided to stay up until midnight to test my theory and see if the storm really would end.

  I sat there in silence, gripping my mug of hot chocolate with a blue candle burning on my side table for protection against psychic attacks. I blinked, realizing my gaze had become unfocused, and cleared my vision. The wind had died down. I chanced a glance at my clock and saw that it was just a few minutes after midnight. I walked over to my window, securely bundled up in an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants, and opened the window. It was still raining, but it had a different quality about it now; I didn’t feel magic in the air.

  I looked up at the sky and realized the clouds were a flat gray now, no longer billowing in different shades of black. I couldn’t hear thunder in the distance anymore and even as I stood there the rain lost some of its consistency. I felt my cell phone vibrate in the pouch pocket of my sweatshirt and answered it. “Hello?”

  “Are you watching?” Jodi’s voice asked me.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “This is bad.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know how I know, but I know it’s stopping because he was answered, not denied,” her voice was calm and even.

  “I know.” I nodded even though she couldn’t see me.

  “Shay, we have to find out who’s doing this. If we don’t, he’s gonna kill someone,” Jodi’s voice wasn’t scared or worried; it sounded angry.

  “I know.” Someone had invaded our territory and destroyed a little bit of our peace. I felt like someone had slapped me in the face. “We will, Fae, we will.”

  I went to bed expecting to feel scared or worried, but, just like Jodi, I felt resolved that, no matter what was out there, we were going to stop it. We knew that it was just a person and nothing to be scared of. I lay curled in my covers, staring blankly at the ceiling, watching the shadows from my candle dance across the ceiling and walls. I had taken to falling asleep with the television on to help mask my screams in case I woke up from one of my dreams. I reached and found the remote and clicked it on, letting the soft white and blue light mingle with the orange of my candle.

  We didn’t have much time to figure out where the caster was going to perform his final sacrifice, knowing he would have found a new place because of the police and media coverage of the last two ceremonies. I had a feeling the new site wouldn’t be too far from the original. If I had spent so much time and energy on something this powerful, I wouldn’t want to give up the residual power I would have built, so I didn’t expect this guy to. I convinced myself I was right about that because it gave us a much smaller area to search. If we could find the location of the sacrifice, then we didn’t have to worry about figuring out who was doing the magic, we would find him. I just wished I had more time.

  I rolled on to my side, nuzzling into my pillow and felt something sharp dig into the side of my neck. I had almost forgotten about the pentagram necklace; I wore it so often now that I usually forgot to take it off at night. I sat up and unfastened the chain and set it on the bedside table. I felt sleep pull at me and let it drag me under, pulling the covers tighter around me.

  I was walking through a fog bank, white and gray mist swirled around my ankles, parting for me. I could hear the distant crash and wash of ocean waves on the shore but it was too far to taste salt on the air. Grass was beneath my feet, I couldn’t see it, but being barefoot allowed me to feel the cool blades bend beneath me. I heard a twig snap underfoot off to my right and I froze, eyes going wide, trying to take in more of my surroundings. I crouched instinctively, knees and back bent as if I was getting ready to pounce. I turned slowly on the balls of my feet in the direction of the sound, making as little sound as possible.

  “Where are we going?” I heard a young female voice ask, giggling a little, but the voice sounded like an echo in a tunnel, too far away. I waited, breath caught in my throat.

  “Not much farther…” A man’s voice, but I couldn’t recognize it. It wasn’t an echo like the girl’s, but it was too far away to reall
y hear the quality of the voice. The girl laughed again, but the sound was fading. They would be too far away to hear if I didn’t follow. I started off in the direction I thought they were going, staying crouched as if it would hide me if I came upon them. The fog began to dissipate and realized I was in the woods again, but I could still hear the girl’s echoing laugh and knew I had to follow.

  A low rumbling growl clawed the inside of my mind. The air shimmered around me with unholy power. Tips of claws clacked against a stone all too close.

  I took off like a shot, racing through the woods, clawing at the ground for momentum, darting around trees and letting branches whip at my face and scratch my skin. It was behind me again, like a mad dog on the trail of a rabbit, starving for meat and blood. I realized I could still hear the girl’s voice asking where they were going and it wasn’t much farther; I was leading this thing to them. That sense I always had in my dreams that safety was just beyond the next tree was missing this time.

  I changed course, running with everything I had in the opposite direction of the couple. I ran until I thought my side was going to explode with the pain from the cramps, my legs were lead, and I could hear the rushing of my own blood over the crash of the waves. Somehow I found the edge of the forest, bursting out of the line of trees onto a paved road. Like the breaking of a circle, I felt all the magic of the pursuing beast fall away from me.

  I woke immediately, drenched in sweat but miraculously unharmed for once. I lay there, gripping my covers to my chest, breathing in the familiar smell of my room and caught my breath. I refused to get up this time; the monsters always get you when you give up the protection of your covers. I reached blindly for my journal and pulled it in under the covers with me, turning the pages frantically and writing down a list of images from the location of my dream.

  School was closed again on Thursday. The rain had let up, but the schools were so flooded the city had called in special trucks to pump out the water. The news reports said many classrooms on the ground levels of the schools were damaged, so we were probably looking at another day off, a five-day weekend. Too bad it wasn’t something we could enjoy. Jodi and Steven had come over in Steven’s mother’s car and were curled up again in various places in my room. I finally told them about my dreams, accepting the fact that the dreams must be tied to the sacrifices. Maybe they were premonitions of the night we were going to try and stop the guy. If that were so, Steven and Jodi needed to know about the thing chasing me.

  “I wonder why we’re never in your dream,” Steven said, looking at me from the foot of the bed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “Well, you said you usually have the sense that safety is just ahead of you somewhere. Maybe that’s where we are, but you never make it there,” Jodi offered, not looking up from the spell book she was studying.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. I sounded doubtful even to myself. It sounded reasonable enough, but never in my dream did I think I was racing towards them.

  “Ok, so this is the first time you made it to a road, right?” Steven asked, sitting up Indian style.

  “Yeah. I even saw a mile marker. I wrote it all down in my journal,” I motioned to the book with my chin.

  “May I?”

  “Yeah, go for it. It’s on the last page anything is written on.” I picked up the book and passed it to Steven, settling back into my chair and toying with the pentagram that I was wearing again. I realized when I woke up I felt different without it; I felt energy prickling at my skin. I had the uncontrollable urge to get out of the house and go somewhere, but I didn’t know where. As soon as I touched the cool metal of the star, the energy faded away and the urges stopped.

  “Um, Shay?” Steven broke into my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Dude, what page is it on?”

  “The last one with writing.”

  “No, there’s a spell here, and here and here.” He was flipping the pages showing me all the writing. “Here you find it.” He reached towards me with the book.

  “What are you talking about? That was the last thing I wrote…” I opened the book and lost my voice. There were at least ten full pages that I didn’t remember writing, but it was definitely my handwriting. I could feel the intense wrinkles in my brow and the frown pulling at my mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Jodi asked, looking up from her book.

  “I don’t…” I scanned through the pages.

  “What?” Jodi asked again a little more insistently.

  “Um…” I blinked and shook my head. “I don’t remember writing any of this…” I realized my fingers were tingling with energy, like the pages themselves were full of magic waiting for someone to unlock their secrets.

  “What are you talking about?” Steven asked, sharing a worried look with Jodi.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night last night, probably around 2 a.m., and I wrote this,” I had found the page with the list of details from my dream, the handwriting sloppy from darkness and nerves. I turned the open book for them to see. “And then I went back to sleep, almost immediately. I didn’t write anything this morning…” I just didn’t understand and now my two best friends were looking at me like I was crazy. Great.

  “So you’re saying you were… sleep writing?” Jodi asked a little too carefully.

  “Stranger things have happened,” I snapped at her; she recoiled like I’d struck her. “Sorry, but you two look like I’m crazy or something.”

  “We don’t think you’re crazy. It’s just, that’s a lot of writing to not remember,” Steven said before Jodi could lash out.

  “I know that, that’s why it bothers me this much. And it feels…” I stopped and glared at the book, willing it to tell me what it was hiding.

  “What?” they asked in chorus.

  “Here,” I reached out to hand them the book. I didn’t want to tell them what I felt; I wanted to see if they could feel it. “See if you get anything from it.” They looked at me for a minute, both considering my face. Eventually, Jodi was the first to nod and took the book from me. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and set her hand above the book, not quite touching, just like I taught her. Her eyes fluttered and then she snapped her hand back like she’d been shocked.

  “What?” Steven asked.

  “That’s a lot of energy. I mean, wow.” She shook her hand, trying to get the tingling sensation to go away. “Here, see for yourself.” She handed the book to Steven and he copied her every move, right down to snatching his hand back and shaking the feeling out of it.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s residual. You know how there was so much magic in the air yesterday you could reach out and grab it. Maybe I just had a lot of stored up energy and channeled it,” I said with a shrug. It sounded reasonable enough to me. I was toying with my necklace again absentmindedly. “Anyway, just flip back like ten pages, Steven, you’ll find the stuff from my dream.”

  I sat back in my chair, curling my legs under me and sitting on my ankles. I reached for my cup of tea and took a deep breath, steadying and grounding myself. It was unnerving to find out I could be doing something like writing spells and not even be awake. It seemed reckless and dangerous.

  “Hey, question,” Steven said, marking his spot on the page with his index finger before looking up at me. “You have the word ‘highway’ written here and a mile marker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ok, so you were in the woods, but you could hear the ocean nearby and then you broke out onto a highway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you see the ocean when you hit the road?” Steven asked.

  “Actually… yeah.” I said realizing I hadn’t thought to note that. “But it was so dark in the dream I didn’t realize that was the ocean. So… that can’t be Ojai then.”

  “No, it’s Malibu,” Steven said, looking from me to Jodi. “At least on the way to Malibu. It’
s probably around County Line.” County line is a very popular surf spot in between Ventura County and Malibu.

  “Dude, you’re right,” I said sitting up straight. The picture fell into place in my mind like the last puzzle piece. “But that’s so far away from the original spot! Why would he give up all that power out there?”

  “Do you remember what you said when we were scrying and saw the ceremony site?” Jodi asked.

  “What?”

  “You said they were amateurs, remember? Maybe they really are, maybe they don’t realize that they raised power at that place that they could tap into and are just moving because of the attention they attracted.”

  “That does make sense, Shay,” Steven agreed.

  “Yeah, probably.” I chewed the inside of my bottom lip, my eyes unfocused as I remembered last night’s dream. “Well then, maybe we have the site for tomorrow night, or at least the location. We can go and stake it out and when we see who ever it is and who ever the girl is, we can stop it.”

  “What about the beast that chases you?” Jodi asked.

  “What about it?” I looked at her a little confused.

  “Aren’t you worried about it?”

  “I guess not. I mean, you guys aren’t ever in the dream, so maybe the dream was also a warning about what could happen if you didn’t go with me. But you’ll be there. That’ll probably change some of the outcomes.” I shrugged. “Besides, the beast may not even be real. It could be my subconscious warning me about getting hurt by the guy that’s doing this.”

  “Yeah, I guess…” Jodi didn’t sound so sure.

  “What would make you feel better?” I asked.

  “Maybe we should go tonight and try and find the place he’s gonna be and do some preemptive casting for protection?”

  “How can we cast against something we don’t know what is? Or if it even exists?” Steven asked.

  “Yeah, that does seem kinda dangerous,” I said. “Besides, I’m a little worried going near Malibu today, anyway. There were probably landslides or something from yesterday. It’s not much, but one more day for the ground to settle would make me feel better.”