Finally, in a great flash, the light vanished, taking the meager candle flames with it. Max and Helena fell to the floor, exhausted and overcome by the defeat.
The thread had not been found.
****
Seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours since Abby had last seen Sebastian. Seventy-two hours since she'd last truly slept, eaten or felt whole. Only in the early morning hours did she leave her room and now, at three am, she walked the castle halls. She went to the dungeons and, zombie-like, slipped in and out of the rooms. She heard sounds behind Dafne's door, but merely walked by without a thought. She returned to the library and lay down on the thick carpet in front of the crackling fire. In the fetal position, she stared into the flames and cried.
When her eyes closed, she did not slip off to sleep, but instead fell into the familiar cave that beckoned to the witch's astral body. She had visited before, several times now and felt unafraid as she glided through the shadowy tunnel. She felt her grief in the cave as palpable as in the castle. Had some part of her thought that solace lay in the cave? No. She knew that only confusion, fear and anger--yes, anger--followed her now.
She neared the fork of the three tunnels, intending to go into the left tunnel where she had yet to travel, but an unseen force pulled her toward the center pathway. She knew what lay in the end of the passage--The Pool of Truth--a gossamer pond that revealed horrific truths to the witches who were called to it. Abby tried to stop, reaching out blindly, fighting to dig her heels into the dirt, but in her astral body, she had no physical form, only a presence less solid than the steam that rose from a tea kettle.
The tunnel had lost all its magic. She had discovered her Aunt Sydney in the Pool. She remembered Sydney's bloated face and the unending heartache of accepting that she would never hear Sydney's laughter again.
Abby could not meet the water a second time but, despite her efforts, she could not flee from her astral body. Usually, she had only to think of her physical form and she would snap, rubber-band like, back into the tangible realm. She tried every tip that Max had taught her. She imagined a pin poking into her flesh. She closed her eyes and pretended to awaken from a long sleep. She muttered the familiar phrase that connected her to mundane reality. "What's for breakfast?" She spoke it again and then she screamed it, but still her body floated forward.
She moved into the opening and the pool gazed back at her, reflecting nothing because she was not really there. She wondered then if any of it was really there--the cave, the Pool of Truth, the tunnels carved into rock. Water flowed from the chasm in the cave ceiling. It trickled and splashed and she bit back a scream as a force carried her over the rock ledge and into the water below.
She did not swim, but floated down as if cement boots were fastened to her legs. She gazed into the crystalline water beneath her, but saw no bottom to the pool. It was an endless watery grave and when she looked back up and saw the soft black curls wafting like a halo, she screamed and bucked, fighting the image of Sebastian, but still the cave did not disappear. As she watched, his body drifted, his gray t-shirt ballooning out and away, and she saw Claire's initials beneath his sleeve. She saw his coarse fingernails and the diamond-shaped mole on his left foot and then his eyes, beautiful, blue, but vacant. She had looked into those eyes and felt the most intense love and fear and desire, but now they were dark and empty, their light extinguished.
****
"Abby, Abby." Lydie screamed and shook Abby as she lay on the floor convulsing, her head snapping from side to side, her gaze fixed on some unseen horror.
Oliver shot through the door, his eyes wild and sleepy. He saw Abby sprawled by the fireplace and a sobbing Lydie over her. He ran to her, pulled Lydie away and shifted her head so that it was in line with her spine. He looked into her eyes and knew that she was astrally-traveling, but to where he could not tell. He sensed danger and went to the fire, dipped one of the metal pokers into the flame and returned.
"I'm sorry, honey," he told the convulsing Abby as he touched the poker to the flesh on her right hand.
In the Pool of Truth, Abby started to reach for Sebastian, wanting intensely to grasp him around the waist and take him with her, but as her fingers took hold of his hand, the pool, Sebastian, and the cave vanished and she returned to her body.
She snapped back, her body rigid and her eyes, bulging with terror, locked on Oliver's before the screams, that she'd been trying to let out, made their way up her vocal chords and into the room. She wailed and rocked and turned on her side, clawing at the carpeting as though it held her hostage.
Elda raced into the room and then Faustine. They stood watching her as she curled into a ball and sobbed like a child. Elda went to her, knelt and rubbed her back. She felt the weight of Faustine's gaze. Elda knew that their call had failed. The energies of the universe granted them no reprieve and now she saw that only more horrors lay ahead.
When they finally calmed her, Helena force-fed her a trauma elixir and Abby told them about Sebastian in the Pool of Truth.
"Please, please," she begged Elda. "It made a mistake, it had to. He's not dead, I know he's not."
Elda sat on a stool across from Abby and patted her knee, shaking her head slowly.
"Oh, Abby, I want so badly to tell you that The Pool makes mistakes. I would give almost anything, but you know that I can't. You know that."
Tears ran down her face and salted her lips and she squeezed her hands together in a fist at her stomach. She felt sick and dizzy and she wanted to rip out her own heart and cast it into the fire if it meant no more pain.
"I can't take this," she said between sobs. "I can't take any more of this."
Oliver stood behind her, his hands resting on her chair back. He had tried to rub her shoulders, but she'd batted him angrily away. She didn't want to be touched and she didn't want to be soothed. She wanted Sebastian. She wanted him to walk into the room and ask Abby to reverse the course of their lives. They would walk backwards out of the castle, row backwards across the lake and, instead of fleeing to Ula after the Vepars attacked them, they would hop on a flight to Australia and and live out their days at the beach.
The thought made her cry harder.
"We will find out what happened to Sebastian," Faustine told her feebly. The look of helplessness in his face unnerved them all.
"You have to find out for sure if he's dead," Abby insisted, her eyes going to Faustine's and then back to Elda's. "There must be some way. Can you go to the Pool."
"It calls out to us, Abby," Elda told her gently. "It's not a choice. It's a doorway that is only open to witches who have a message on the other side."
"But why is he dead?" she wailed, doubling over with an agony she had never known. "Who killed him? Tobias? Did Tobias kill him?"
Elda and Faustine exchanged a look, but neither spoke.
Abby picked up her teacup and threw it across the room where it smashed against one of the bookshelves. She stood from her chair and ran out of the library and out of the castle, welcoming the moonless night.
She walked for hours. She walked the woods, the floating garden with flowers in night bloom, and the edges of both lagoons, up and down the sand dunes. She cried through it all and sometimes she stomped the flowers and kicked the trunks of the trees and twice she sat on the ground and cried so hard that she thought she might actually damage some part of her brain from the sheer force of her sobs.
She crawled down to the outcropping of rock where she and Sebastian had made love only weeks before. She began to talk to him. She asked him about his first kiss and his favorite kind of candy and what he wore for Halloween when he was ten years old. She told him that she once stole panties from a department store because her mother wouldn't let her buy thong underwear. She described how much she hated the third grade because her mother bought a sewing machine from an infomercial and insisted on making all of Abby's clothes herself. Most of her smocks looked like pillow cases with neck and arm-holes cut into them.
"My best memory though?" she continued, growing drowsy, "was the first time that I saw you. I remember your Pink Floyd t-shirt and this huge curl hanging in your eyes and I think the whole world opened for me right then. You know what else? I think you're the reason I found my power. It was you all along..."
She rested her head on the grass and closed her eyes.
****
"We must be able to do something," Oliver said angrily, slopping his coffee onto the tablecloth.
Bridget swept her fingers over the stain and it disappeared. Elda smiled at her apologetically.
"Oliver, you know better than that. We are witches, not gods. Some things must be endured and accepted. Pain is part of the process and..." she held up her hand to silence his interruption, "we all experienced some version of what Abby is experiencing now. You know this."
"Do you hear yourself?" he asked, unable to control his temper. "Someone murdered Sebastian. Something plucked him from a party filled with a thousand witches and murdered him!"
Bridget stood and began to clear their cups from the table. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she seemed close to breaking down. Elda waited until she left to answer him.
"Of course I understand the gravity of our situation Oliver. We all do, but we must not rush. Maybe this is a single incident. Or perhaps Sebastian's death is the tip of an iceberg that has not yet been revealed, but we cripple ourselves with assumptions. Faustine and Max are at Sorciére at this very moment. They will know more when they return and then perhaps we can go forward."
Oliver wanted to argue, to demand, as Abby had done, that the coven do something more, but Elda was right. The calling came with great sacrifice. He had lost much and his loss barely compared to the others. He didn't know the depths of their sacrifice and yet he could not remember a time when he felt as powerless as he did in that moment. Worse yet, he felt guilty because some small part of him had rejoiced in Sebastian's disappearance. Maybe that same part rejoiced in his death. He saw Elda watching him and looked shamefully out the window.
He could not reconcile his growing feelings for Abby. He tried to fight his desire to get closer to her, but it continued to live. Sometimes it felt like the little devil on his shoulder calling out to him to steal her away, but the core of him knew better. In his pure heart, loving Abby meant loving Sebastian because she had chosen him. When love took form, the individual no longer existed without the whole. Any separateness was merely an illusion.
****
After nearly seventy-three cups of tea, Helena pressed her face into her palms and started to cry. For hours she scoured the tea leaves, divining the past and the future. She asked for guidance, but received only jumbled images. Never in her life had the leaves been so unclear.
"Or maybe it's me," she said aloud.
"Or maybe it's Ula," Bridget said from the doorway, startling Helena.
Bridget sat next to Helena at the small kitchen table stacked with cookbooks, but rarely used for eating. She looked at the mound of wet leaves Helena had hurriedly dumped in her quest for the truth.
"You think there's something wrong at Ula?" Helena asked, searching for a moment of stillness to feel the energy of the castle. She expected a buzzing, an aliveness, but a strange silence settled over her.
"Yes, you feel it now. Like a vacuum? It's as if we've been sucked into a black hole..."
Helena nodded and looked again at the cup before her. The leaves had formed a chaotic shape that resembled something like a feather.
"I've seen that," Bridget told her, peering into the cup. "A feather, a black widow spider, a hang-man's noose. I've been getting bad omens for weeks..."
Helena felt a sinking feeling and she turned to face Bridget. She didn't even need to ask the question and Bridget nodded.
"Just like before..."
Chapter Eight
"Abby, you're naked!" Oliver screamed, rushing through the rain toward her.
She barely registered his voice beneath the water pelting her body. She was naked, naked, covered in goosebumps and writhing beneath the treacherous sky in agony and desperation. She had not returned to the castle all day, but instead stood at the cliff edge and wished to die along with Sebastian. As she attempted to accept that he would never return, the thought of spending another moment at Ula made her skin crawl.
Her heart was heavier than the wet, cumbersome sand beneath her, and split into more pieces than there were grains along the shore. She cried and the rain took it and swept her tears into long snaking rivers down her trembling body.
She could have succumbed to the power. Her spirit would have ripped her from the egoic pain of her loss and catapulted her into a lightning storm of energy. But she refused its beckoning fingers. She refused the thoughtlessness and peace. Instead, she imagined him. She held him in her mind in a perfect memory that can only really exist as a memory and she rocked on her toes beneath the thundering sky.
When Oliver tried to take her hands, she pummeled his chest until he released her. He did not know what to do, but stood, watching her in confused awe.
She was wild, hair wet and ravished and curled around her head. Her body was lean and slick and powerful. He saw her muscles, taut, the veins in her forearms twisted and blue in her translucent flesh. Her brown eyes had taken on the yellow of the storm and they flashed from their teary pools.
He turned to the castle, hoping to see Elda or Faustine running to his aid, but no one came. The castle loomed beyond them, the heavy wood door closed to the lashing winds. He could almost imagine them hovering by windows, staring nervously at the spectacle of Abby at the lagoon edge, naked and raging.
She blamed them. She blamed all of them and her accusations, though not voiced, struck them equally. They could have sedated her, forced her into the library to thaw before the fire, but she was not bound to their coven. She was free, limitless, and her energy rebuked them. Only Oliver could get close and, though she did not fight him with her power, she fought him with her fists.
"Please," he said weakly, holding out his hands to her, palms toward the sky.
She did not even look at them, or at him. She turned and fled into the water, disappearing beneath the cold, gray surface. He nearly chased her in, took a step to do so, but her head popped up and she began to swim vigorously away from him.
"Leave her." The voice, Faustine's, was sharp and cut into this thoughts.
He turned and glared at the tower where he knew Faustine must be, reaching out to him telepathically. Faustine and Max had returned from Sorciére with nothing.
"No," Oliver thought and jerked his head from side to side.
But the voice came again, more insistent.
"She needs this, Oliver. She needs to grieve."
Oliver's jaw tightened and he took another fleeting look into the lagoon. He could see her already on the other side, emerging and running. Her naked body disappeared into the gnarled cherry trees beyond.
She ran and dove off the sand dune on the far side of the island. Her body flew into the pelting rain and she could see nothing, not the dark starless sky above or the black churning waters below. She did not immediately fall, but floated, connecting so deeply with her element that her physical body barely existed. Only when she remembered again her grief did her body regain its weight and allow the force of gravity to drive her into the icy waters below. She hit with full impact, ignoring all of her lessons to lighten herself before the water. Every cell of her body screamed out with the force of the blow and she felt white-hot pain as her lips split open and her head thrust back. The waves crashed and churned, twisting her in their roiling caress. She closed her eyes and let go to the water.
****
Oliver found her floating face up. The rain, now slowed to a steady drizzle, slid over her bruised face. The blood had washed away, but he could see where her skin had torn and already begun to heal. He leaned over the side of the rowboat and hooked his forearms beneath her armpits, pulling her easily into the boat. Her naked b
ody shone in the moon's glow and her wet hair looked oily and dark against her pearl skin. The dive from the cliffs did not mean death for a witch, unless of course they blocked their intuitive shield on the way down and simply hit the water like a human would. He could see that Abby had done just that.
He laid her across his knees and carefully wrapped her in a flannel blanket. She did not stir and, as the boat rocked gently with the waves, her head lolled from side to side.
****
Abby awoke in an unfamiliar room. She watched the shadows from several flickering candles dance along the bulky wooden beams overhead. She could feel her nakedness beneath the heavy comforter and some soreness, but nothing else. Had she expected death? Maybe. At least physical agony, a worthy distraction, but her witch body healed in a special way so she had not even the respite of physical destruction to aid her. The deeper pain blotted out embarrassment, regret and any emotion born of thought.
She turned her head to examine the room. It was large and rectangular and quite different from the one that she occupied. The walls consisted of rough wood, unsanded and knotted. Where windows might have been, the room opened onto a large stone balcony. A gleaming wood burning stove sat in its center surround by black leather chairs. The bed she lay in was propped high, perhaps on a platform and wire cables connected it to the beams overhead. To her left, she saw a wall of Americana with posters of James Dean and Elvis, bookshelves lined with records, CDs, DVDs and even a desk with an enormous desktop computer. The bedside table, an overturned barrel, was jumbled with photo frames and she leaned toward them scanning the unfamiliar faces. She stared at each carefully finally landing on a tall red frame that depicted two young men in kayaks. Their tanned skin and light blond hair made them almost look like twins, but Abby recognized Oliver's wide blue eyes. The other man's eyes were hazel and his chin was softer. Abby realized that Oliver had a brother.
Sorciére (Born of Shadows Book 2) Page 10
