Elemental Shadows

by Phaedra Weldon

  Maybe it was time to start confiding in Kyle and Ivan. They were a large part of my life now, and though they we were both around the same age as me; I always saw them as much younger and in need of mothering. Eh…had to be that Elemental nature of mine.

  I retrieved my phone and pressed the button.

  But instead of my usual locked screen of a full moon, a shadow looked back at me. I was so startled I dropped the phone and jumped back. The stool fell backward and Grey took off across the room, startled.

  It wasn't often I was frightened like that. I'd seen a lot of crap in my life, sometimes to a point where what scared the average person barely made a blip on my radar. But that…

  I tried recalling exactly what I'd seen from my memory—and that's where it got hard. There weren't any real distinguishing features to it. Just the impression of a face, with sunken holes for eyes and tiny red dots. I couldn't remember a mouth or even a nose.

  Grey returned, looking a little embarrassed that she ran away. She bent her nose at the phone. It landed with the face on the floor, which of course, just made the idea of picking it up and turning it over to see the face again a bit more scary.

  I watched her sniff it, and then she wagged her tail. I took that as a sign and retrieved it.

  When I turned it over, I gasped.

  A crack moved from the lower left corner all the way up to the upper right corner. I stared at the crack for a while as Grey whined at me. At first I thought…I could have sworn…I saw a thin, red worm crawling out from the crack across the glass. Then another one popped out.

  More of the red worms poured out from the crack and squirmed around on top of the glass. I recognized what I was seeing—this was Ivan's description of what he saw when he viewed Arcane Magic. Usually, I saw it as red and sparkling. Like glitter.

  The smell followed the worms. The rotting chicken aroma.

  Grey barked.

  The phone buzzed, and then rang as Crwys's number showed up. I slammed the phone on the counter. The worms abruptly disappeared. There was no way I was answering that.

  I ran my fingers through my hair. I needed to find my center and think. Times like this, I wished I had a bunch of white boards I could throw up in my apartment and just write everything down like a detective would. Put all the tiny pieces together and look at things in a whole instead of feeling overwhelmed by a dozen little things.

  Though my dad losing his mind and me being threatened with being warlocked weren't little things.

  Ina had white boards in her house. She used to use them to teach students.

  Well, she used them to teach her ghouls how to kill people and do her bidding. But they were still white boards. As far as I knew, no one had been in the house since the night I killed Arwen and ended up in the hospital. My hand went to the spot on my neck where Dionysus bit me.

  The house was legally mine. Ina—Dionysus—had insisted on us jointly owning it. I never understood why. He was gone. Crwys suspected he was off starting a new life, probably one he'd been planning on for a while. Might have even taken a new body. Probably a man this time.

  Me? I wasn't so sure. Dionysus had invested a lot of time taking care of me—but I didn't know why. Me. The daughter of his tormentor. I had this bad suspicion I wasn't going to find that out for a while, and when I did, I wasn't going to like it.

  Going back into that house wasn't my top priority. But I needed to be away from everyone for a breather. How was I going to react emotionally to returning to a house where I murdered someone?

  I didn't know. But if there was one thing Dionysus had taught me it was to face my fears head on. Don't run from them, but run into them.

  And right now, I was afraid of that house. Of what I did. And that fear had kept me in a state of hesitancy for the past two weeks. I felt if I moved through this level, I could think clearer and pick a direction.

  Any freak'n direction.

  I grabbed my phone with a dishtowel, even though I didn't see anymore of those little red worms, slipped it into my bag, grabbed my guns and loaded Grey in the Jeep.

  It was time to face fear number one head on.

  The smell that hit me when I opened the door knocked me back a few steps. Grey whined but she went inside. It wasn't like a garbage smell. More like an earthy, compost heap smell. And I had a pretty good idea where it came from.

  I learned about Dionysus’s plan for my mom and Ina's unwilling part in it all on Halloween. Ina had been in the kitchen making pies and the center island had been filled with baskets of all sorts of apples. Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Ladies, MacIntosh…

  Now, all of those apples were little more than rotted husks in ruined baskets in the kitchen. The pies she'd made sat on the stove where she'd put them to cool and each one was covered in a thick, green mold.

  I stood by the island looking down at the place where Dionysus tried to drain me. My blood, now stained brown, still coated parts of the white tile floor. There weren't any black dusts of powder where a CSI team looked for prints. No police tape in the back yard around the Circle.

  Because Crwys had taken care of everything. There was no body to find. No evidence of what I'd done. Except what I held in my memory and the sparkle of glittering red I sometimes saw when I worked magic. It was small, just a tinge of it, but it was there.

  Arcane.

  It was permeating my magic. Slow but steady. Was this what it was supposed to do? Everything I'd ever been told about Arcane Magic was that it was forbidden, that it was evil and it would destroy a Witch's soul. And I guess it had destroyed mine in a way. I'd been so focused on thinking Arwen was the Leviathan I was looking for that I couldn't see the reality in front of me.

  Something moved out of my peripheral vision. It was fast and low, and I thought for a second it was Grey, but she was at my feet. She was looking in the same direction, her ears perked forward.

  The motion had been in the dining room just off the kitchen. I summoned a Salamander as my hand burst into red flame and moved cautiously into that room. The Salamander hovered nearby, watching the room too, and turned as if watching something move past it.

  "Is there someone here?" My voice did nothing to reassure me. It was possible there were transients, or homeless kids in the house. Dionysus had usually opened this house to them, and now I shuddered thinking of what he might have done to them right under my nose.

  The Salamander turned to me and shrugged. I dismissed him with a thank you and cautiously moved through the rest of the lower level. Nobody but me.

  I put my hands to my face and took a deep breath. All this talk about ghosts, Shadow People and Crwys wanting a Ghostbusters Spell was making me jumpy. It didn't help that my own dad wanted me to exorcise mom. The best thing to do would be clean it all up. Wash it away. And Cleanse the house.

  Get rid of all traces of Dionysus.

  Grabbing gloves out of the broom closet, I cleared the kitchen of all its rotten apples, the baskets, the moldy pies and what was still in the oven. The ovens were off. I assumed Crwys had shut them off so they wouldn't start a fire and bring attention to this house.

  Once everything was bagged, I ran hot water into a bucket and mopped with every detergent I could find, including bleach.

  Never dismiss the magic of bleach.

  I'd been in the house a little over two hours by the time I finished cleaning the kitchen and the dining area. The rest of the house looked like it always had. The herb room was the saddest to me. Most of Ina's potted plants were brown and dying from neglect. I watered what I thought could be saved and threw out the rest.

  After sweeping dead leaves from the floor, I moved on to Ina's room upstairs—everything looked as if the owner had just stepped out to the store. As if life had been cut off. I looked through her clothing, the drawers, a chest—anything I thought she'd leave some kind of clue as to where she went.

  Nothing.

  Until I took a long look at the mirror. I wasn't looking at myself, but more at the glass. Th
ere was something smudged there, reflected in the afternoon light coming through the bedroom window. Someone wrote something on the mirror.

  I narrowed my eyes at it, bent forward, took a deep breath and then breathed on the glass. Not like a regular breath, but a mouth open breath, like most people did when they wanted to polish or buff something.

  When I stepped back, a message appeared.

  The box is yours.

  The box? I looked around the room. There were a lot of boxes, but nothing I could designate as mine. I examined the dresser where the note was written and spotted a small, blue dust-covered box behind a picture of me and Ina when I was fourteen and we moved into this new house.

  I picked the box up and my fingers tingled. Was this a booby-trap? Something that was going to hurt me physically or magically? I held the box in my left hand and waved my right over it. A white pentagram spun into being and passed around the box. Nothing flagged. No alarm.

  Grey padded into the room and whined. I lowered the box for her to see it and she touched it with her nose.

  "I guess it means it's okay." But I was very suspicious of anything left here by Dionysus.

  Inside was a delicate silver pentagram. I carefully held it out to get a good look at it in the light. Around the circle and woven into the crossing bars that made the star was the etched image of a tree.

  I recognized it immediately. This was the symbol my mom's Coven had used when I was a kid. All the members had one of these, and I had wanted one myself. But I had to be initiated first.

  Was this Inamorata's pentagram? Her sigil from the Coven before Dionysus took her?

  Balancing it in my hand I lowered it to Grey again. "Whatcha think, girl? Should I wear it?"

  Grey put her nose into my palm and backed up, moving her head from side to side. I was gonna take that as a no. And I agreed. Jewelry from Dionysus was a bad idea, seeing as how he'd given me that heirloom necklace with the ability to suck souls into it.

  I put the pentagram back in the box and back on the dresser. "No thanks, asshole. If I wore one, it'd be my mom's."

  Grey barked and the hairs on the backs of my arms stood on end. Looking in the mirror I saw something in the bed behind me. I whirled with my hands up, white fire ready.

  But there was nothing there. No one else in the room.

  The Circle was visible from the window overlooking the back garden. From the second story, everything looked peaceful. Quiet. Nothing there to tell the tale of what happened in the Sacred Space.

  "Come on girl. Time for me to face the music."

  But once in the garden, and in the center of the Circle, standing in the very spot where Arwen died—there was nothing to face. No music. Not a sound. It was a dead zone. No hint of power, no thrill to touch the edges of my soul.

  The ground glittered red where I shed her blood, and I had to keep telling myself that was Arcane and not real blood. Real blood was long gone, either by Crwys's hand or by that of nature.

  When I stepped away from that space, I could feel the Circle again.

  I'd left a dead zone in the center of Sacred Space. This had also been the place where I'd talked to Tzariene, the Seelie Queen, also known as the Silver Queen of Faerie. The Summer Court.

  Maybe if I Cleansed the Circle and was able to talk to Tzariene again, I could find out if the original children were in Alfheim. If I could find them, that would be at least one thing off my list of things to make right.

  The Silver Queen would need something in trade. We'd used honey milk before. I'd have to think on an appropriate trade later. I had to clean up my mess first.

  Searching through Ina's books, I didn't come up with anything, and several times while in her library I got the feeling I was being watched. But when I looked up—there was nothing there. My nerves were shot.

  Eventually, I came to the assumption that the only way to Cleanse Arcane was with an Arcane spell. Back in the kitchen I removed the necklace and pulled the drive from its chain. After setting it on the now clean center isle, I put my hand on the drive and said, "Open Sesame."

  The drive instantly expanded in a beautiful, swirling sparkle of red glitter. I stepped back as it pulled more Arcane from the air itself, and my fingertips. It started unfolding and unfolding until it was the proper size with the last bend and became a book.

  Grey growled and I waved at her to shush. She didn't like the book, and she'd tried to chew it up a few times.

  To anyone else but me and Ivan, this book would look like a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum. Hardback. Old leather cover.

  To us it was a spell book of Arcane Magic, and the very book the Clerics had threatened me for that morning.

  Had it only been just this morning?

  The problem with books like this was the lack of an index. I'd seen a big spell book once that actually had one, and a table of contents, but that book wasn't accessible as it was in Savannah, Georgia.

  So I had to go through it page by page.

  A loud noise startled us. Grey jumped up from where she'd been lounging on the kitchen floor and ran into the dining room. Again.

  I dove into my bag by the stove and retrieved my guns. With the Lady in my left and the Lord in my right, both of them loaded and ready to fire, I pressed my back to the wall on the kitchen side of the archway. On the count of three I turned with both hands out, both guns up and ready.

  Before, when I summoned the Salamander, I'd been thinking of having to deal with supernatural elements. Things that were Arcane and magic based. But the slam and footsteps I was hearing now were made in the physical world, so I was now thinking I was dealing with an intruder. A real one, and not my imagination.

  As I moved through the dining room I glanced through the sliding glass door to the Circle—

  Someone was moving inside at the Circle! Well son of a bitch! Someone had broken into Ina's backyard, which as far as I knew, was an impossibility. I ran to the door, opened it and moved along the tall cypress I'd helped Ina plant when we moved into the house.

  "Freeze!" I shouted as I burst through and pointed my guns at the altar.

  The person I'd seen wasn't there. No one was there.

  I heard another noise, this time from inside the house and Grey was howling, barking, and growling.

  I ran back to the house, burst through the door and saw the back of Grey in the doorway to the kitchen. But just as I arrived and pointed my guns inside, I saw…

  It.

  There was no other way to describe it. It wasn't a man or a woman that I could see. It was close to six feet tall and made of…shadow.

  It was the image of someone, but not the substance. And it was bending over the Hammer.

  "You hold it right there, asshole."

  The thing did seem to hesitate before it turned and looked at me. It had eyes…and a nose…just like the thing in my phone had.

  A deep, low, and slow laugh that reminded me of the Uncola 7-up guy, vibrated the tile floor under my feet as it bowed to me, just before it plunged its hands into the book.

  I fired over and over again, but the bullets went through it and struck the range hood, the fridge, the doorframe to the TV room and the island itself.

  The laughter increased in volume as it, and the book, did this weird motion blur and vanished.

  I ran to the island and slapped both of my hands, with the guns, on the counter.

  No!

  I put the guns on the island and bent down to look under it. I ran into the TV room, the living room, and the herb room. But the shadow form and the book were gone.

  My phone rang in the bag and it took me a minute to figure out where it as. I remembered the red worms and hesitated as I pulled it out. The crack was still there but the worms were gone. Kyle was calling so I put him on speaker phone 'cause I really, really needed to talk to him. "Hey, you're not going to believe what just happened—"

  "I'm pretty sure I will, cause you need to sit down."

  I put the phone on the island as
I continued looking around. That thing took the Hammer! And this bit of knowledge was causing me no end of panic. Without that book, Ivan couldn't make a copy. Without a copy to give to the Clerics, they were going to try and warlock Arden and she was going to blame me if that happened. "I am not sitting down!" I yelled at the phone, and realized I had a bit of hysteria in my voice.

  "Okay then stand. That first house with the dog? You were right. Just a simple Daemon. Kicked that out with a spell. The other stuff? Sam…these things are real. Ivan and I both saw them."

  "What things? Ghosts?"

  "No, these Shadow People."

  I straightened up. Right…the people Ivan talked about. "What did they look like?"

  "They're sort of different sizes, but none are as tall as Ivan and I. And they're fast. It's easier to look at them if you sort of try to out of the corner of your eye. You can't really see them if you look at them head on."

  I knew for a fact that wasn't completely true. "Ah…you said they were shorter than you two?"

  "Yeah. Even shorter than you."

  I wasn't that short. I was 5'7".

  "But do they have arms and legs and red pinpoint eyes?"

  "Eyes? No…uh uh. No eyes. But they do have arms and legs. And they laugh. A lot. Ivan swears he can hear them crying."

  The laughter….check. I put my hand flat on the island's surface where the book had been. "I think I just saw one too. Only mine was over six foot and it had a laugh like the Uncola guy."

  I heard Kyle talking to someone whom I assumed was Ivan. A pause and then Ivan's voice came through. "Tell me what you saw, Sam."

  I described it as best I could, and I also told him about seeing the same kind of face on my phone. And the worms.

  Ivan didn't say anything at first, then. "You saw that thing on your phone?"

  "Yeah. It looked like it was in my phone looking out at me."

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm at Ina's house."