Five: Out of the Dark

by Anderson, Holli

  Johnathan’s face was a mask of shock, as I’m sure mine was. Madame LaForte backed away and held her pentacle necklace up in a defensive posture.

  “Madame LaForte,” I said. “What’s wrong? This is Johnathan. We’ve done nothing to trick you.”

  She narrowed her eyes warily for a moment and then gestured me forward, “Come here, girl, slowly. You stay there,” she shook an angry finger at Johnathan.

  I went and stood in front of her. She gingerly touched my arm, and relaxed slightly. “Good,” she said. “You are untainted … for now.”

  “What do you mean, untainted?” I asked. I wanted to add, why are you being so weird? But decided against it, since it was kind of a dumb question … she was always weird.

  “He has been turned. I can feel the evil. He must leave my house. He cannot be here!” Her voice rose in pitch.

  Johnathan held his hands up in a placating gesture and said, “Okay, Madame. I’ll wait for Paige outside. Just, please, let her stay, we need some information.”

  “Fine. Leave.”

  It was up to me.

  She turned to me when she was sure Johnathan was out of her house and said, “What happened to him? Tell me!”

  I explained what happened with the changeling. Madame LaForte stood quietly and listened. As I described what had happened the night before, her eyes grew wide.

  “Girl, I’m afraid your friend has been turned. Have ya heard of a lycanthrope?”

  “No …”

  “Very much like a Hollywood werewolf. His blood is tainted with evil.”

  “Okay. Then how do we fix it?” I asked. That was all I cared about.

  She laughed a bitter laugh. “Fix it? You don’t fix it,” she said. “I know of no cure for this evil. If he’s an honorable man, your friend will end his own life in order to spare the lives of his hundreds of potential victims. Including yourself.”

  I gasped at her harsh words. “He will do no such thing! I will find a cure if it’s the last thing I do! There has to be a way!”

  “Poor girl. If there is a way, no human knows it. Maybe the Fae people know of a way, but I doubt it. They would exact a harsh payment from you for any information anyway, harsher than most humans would be willing to pay. Death is his only cure, Paige. Death will bring peace for his tormented soul.” She reached a comforting hand toward my arm. I jerked away, frustrated tears stinging my eyes.

  “You’re wrong.” I said, and stormed from her house.

  I didn’t tell Johnathan about her suggestion for a cure. I did tell him the old woman didn’t know of a cure but that she’d given me an idea of how to find one. When he pressed me for details, I said, “Just let me do this for you, John. You can’t do it for yourself. Don’t worry, I will find a way to help you.”

  The sky darkened as black clouds swept across it. The gloominess of the atmosphere matched that of my soul. We walked home in silence as rain poured down on us.

  ohnathan went right to sleep as soon as we reached our new home. The night’s activities had really worn him out. I, however, had a hard time falling asleep, even though I was exhausted. In my haste to find a cure and my subsequent anger at Madame LaForte’s suggestion, I’d neglected to ask some important questions—like, how often will he change? And, when will he change again? Little things like that.

  So, I tossed and turned for about an hour, then I gave up on sleeping for the day. I grabbed the white book and sat down at a table. I thumbed through the chapters on non-human beings, trying to remember the word Madame LaForte had used. Likeand-something. As I flipped quickly through the pages, a picture caught my eye. I backtracked, searching slower for the picture. I found it about five pages back—a drawing of a creature that looked very similar to how Johnathan had looked the night before. Lycanthrope, the caption read.

  There was very little information. It basically said there were two ways to become a lycanthrope. One, it could be genetically handed down from father to son. Or two, a warlock is bitten by some form of lycanthrope—a warlock in the guise of a human, an Elf, or a Goblin. Even Giants weren’t immune to the evil poison of a bite. The change took place only during a full moon. That was good; it meant I had a full month to find a cure. Oh, and there was no known cure. I latched onto the word known because that left the possibility there was a cure, but the people who wrote the book just didn’t know what it was.

  I laid my head on the table, cradled by my folded arms. I fell asleep thinking of what I should do.

  I was awakened quite abruptly by a nightmare. It started out nicely. Johnathan and I were on a date at a fancy restaurant. I sat across the table from him and we held hands, lost in each other’s eyes. The waiter brought our food and set mine in front of me—a perfectly cooked medium steak and an abundance of crab legs. Then he set Johnathan’s plate down, and I gagged. Johnathan’s steak was raw; fresh blood dripped off the plate. His nostrils flared, canine-like. He changed in an instant. He became the long-toothed lycanthrope and gulped down the raw meat in one mouthful, plate and all. Then he looked up at me with a wolfish gleam in his yellow-gold eyes. I awoke, screaming, as he lunged across the table at me.

  More a startled yell, really. That wasn’t even the embarrassing part; the embarrassing part was when I flung myself backward and tipped over in my chair. Alec laughed much longer than was necessary. Seth, bless his heart, tried not to laugh, but couldn’t hold it in once he saw that I was okay. Halli was the only one that showed compassion. She ran over from where she’d been sweeping up some glass behind the bar and said, “Are you okay, Paige? Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I’m fine, Hal,” I said as I pulled myself up off the floor and put the chair back in its place. “And, yes, I did have a bad dream. I guess I shouldn’t fall asleep sitting up.” I punched the still-laughing Alec in the arm as I walked past him. I glanced over at Johnathan’s sleeping bag. He hadn’t even stirred at the commotion. Very unlike him. My stomach did a frightened little flip and I walked over to him. When I heard him snore, I let out the breath I’d been holding. I don’t know what made me fear he wasn’t breathing, but I was sure relieved to find that he was. I knelt beside him and placed a hand on his cheek. His temperature was normal.

  He turned toward my touch and a soft “Paige” escaped his lips in a sigh. A little smile played at the corners of his mouth. My heart fluttered. Apparently, he wasn’t dreaming about me turning into a monster.

  He covered my hand with his—mine still pressed against his cheek—before he completely woke up. He opened his eyes and smiled, still half asleep. As soon as he was fully awake, he let go of my hand and sat up quickly, the smile leaving his face. He met my eyes for only a brief second before averting his gaze to the floor.

  “Johnathan, your eyes,” I started.

  “What about my eyes?” He asked, looking up for the briefest of moments.

  “They … uh … have flecks of gold in them. In the brown parts. That wasn’t there before.”

  He jumped up and hurried over to the broken mirror behind the bar where he inspected his eyes. Still staring at his reflection, he said quietly and to no one in particular, “What color were my eyes when I … turned?”

  I looked around at Alec, Seth, and Halli. They all looked at the floor.

  “They were yellow, gold. No brown at all,” I said, once it was clear that no one else would speak up.

  He roared—roared like a beast—and punched the small sliver of mirror that remained on that portion of the wall. It fell to the floor in a crumble. We all stood in shocked silence. Johnathan never lost his temper. Even during a battle, he was cool and levelheaded.

  I stepped toward him. He looked up at me, eyes blazing with … rage? Hatred? Self-loathing? That look made me stop in my tracks and swallow the soothing words I’d been about to speak. Johnathan spun, catapulted himself over the bar and ran up the stairs and out into the Underground. Alec, Seth, Halli and I stared at each other, mouths open.

  “He’ll be back,” Halli said.
“He just needs to blow off some steam. What did you guys find out at the psychic’s house?”

  I told them what happened at Madame LaForte’s house, leaving out the part about her suggestion that Johnathan kill himself, and continued with what I’d read in the white book.

  “I’m going to go to the library and see what I can dig up there,” I said. “Maybe one of you should go see Joe about finding someone to pose as a parent. I know Johnathan still wants to go ahead with the school thing.” I buckled my belt around my waist and shrugged into my coat.

  “I’ll go see Joe,” Alec volunteered. “Seth, why don’t you come with me? Maybe we can finagle some beef jerky out of him.”

  “Okay. I wanted to grab another newspaper, anyway. And, I’m going to find a way to let Joe know we now have an ice box and stove—maybe our food supply will improve. I’m kind of tired of crackers and peanut butter.” Seth said.

  “Paige,” Halli said, just as I started up the stairs. “Could I come with you? I want to help.”

  I really hadn’t wanted any company. But, I thought, it would be better to have two people looking through books for answers. “Okay, I guess. It’s going to be boring, though. I’m just going to look through a bunch of old books.”

  “That’s fine. Let me get my stuff.” She scampered over to her corner, put on her belt, and was still wrestling into her pink rain jacket when she reached me at the stairs.

  We now had a double set of wards—one at the newly constructed trap-door entrance to our stairs, and one outside the dilapidated building where it was hidden. It took longer to leave or enter that way, but it was safer. Johnathan had taken them down when he stormed out, but didn’t take the time to reset them. I waited until everyone was on the Underground sidewalk to reset the wards. At street level, we went our separate ways.

  The Seattle Central Public Library was enormous. Eleven stories tall, and I figured easy to go unnoticed in. Luckily, you didn’t need to have a library card to enter or to look through stuff. You only needed one if you wanted to borrow a book to take out. There weren’t a lot of people there, but more than I would have thought for midday on a Thursday.

  Since neither Halli nor I could use a computer without essentially blowing it up, I had to resort to asking someone where to start. That isn’t an easy thing to do without looking awfully crazy or suspicious: “Excuse me, but, do you mind helping me find a non-fiction book that might give me the cure for lycanthropy? My friend seems to have gotten himself turned into a werewolf.” So, I told a bit of a story to the nice lady at the helpdesk on the fifth floor.

  “I have to do a paper for a ‘myths and legends’ class I’m taking. Could you help me find where to look for some nonfiction books about lycanthropes or werewolves?” I rolled my eyes derisively when I said werewolves, to let her know I believed in no such thing.

  The accommodating librarian smiled and said, “Nonfiction, huh? I’m sure we can find something helpful.” She typed on her computer for a minute, then said, “Hmm. My computer seems to have frozen. I’ll have to shut it down and log into another one. I’m sorry. It’ll take just a minute.”

  Halli and I smiled in understanding and took a couple of steps away from the computer when the lady turned her attention away. Being magical really had some drawbacks in today’s electronic world.

  A moment later, list in hand, we headed for the seventh floor.

  Most of the books on the list were modern and not at all helpful. They were more or less children’s books that pretended to know about werewolves. I needed to find something older, from a time when people believed the things they truly saw.

  A moment later, we found a book called “The Werewolf in Lore and Legend” by Montague Summers, written in 1933. That was more like it. I started through it while Halli continued to look.

  I found the table of contents and decided that what I was looking for would likely be in Chapter II, The Werewolf: His Science and Practice. I turned to page sixty-three and started to skim over the information. The book was a little hard to read; portions of it were written in un-translated French and Latin—I just skipped over those parts.

  I cringed when I read, “The distinctive features of the wolf are unbridled cruelty, bestial ferocity, and ravening hunger. His strength, his cunning, his speed were regarded as abnormal, almost eerie qualities, he had something of the demon, of hell.” I shuddered. I read on. There seemed to be a recurring theme in the writings of Summers.

  “Lust, then, as well as blood is associated with the wolf.”

  “It is the devil or demons who change a man to a beast.”

  “It cannot, of course, take place without the exercise of black magic.”

  Hmm. An idea started to form on the edge of my consciousness.

  Summers listed some of the theories that had circulated regarding lycanthropy and werewolf-ism. Things like, it was an illusion, and the human’s body was laying inert somewhere else. One explanation: “Evil spirits may mock and cheat our senses in 3 ways: (1) by exhibiting as present what is not really there; (2) by exhibiting what is there as other than it really is; and (3) by concealing what really is there so that it appears as if it were not.”

  My idea began to take a more concrete form. This was caused by evil spirits and black magic. It could be an illusion or a trick of the mind. I wasn’t sure of the connection, but my mind kept returning to a passage in the white book about soul-gazing. It was something that all wizards and witches could do. If you locked gazes with a witch or warlock long enough, several seconds, they could open up a conduit between your mind and theirs. Essentially, they could see into your soul and you could see into theirs. Even people with no magical abilities could get caught up in a soul-gaze with one of us.

  I took notes. Because the thought kept returning to my mind, I wrote soul-gaze and underlined it three times. I looked up and saw Halli sitting nearby, looking through one of several books she’d pulled from the shelf. She also took notes. We would have to compare later.

  I continued reading, but found nothing that talked about a cure. Soon, I could no longer concentrate on the text because my eyes were blurry and my mind was fuzzy from exhaustion.

  “Come on, Hal, let’s go. I want to see if Johnathan made it home yet.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said.

  We stopped for a minute on the fourth floor to gape at the redness of it—seriously, the entire place was red—floor, walls, ceiling, furniture.

  “Wow,” Halli said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, the unaccustomed look of everything being of one color—and the same shade of that color—caused a moment of vertigo as my eyes adjusted.

  “This library is too cool,” Halli shook her head.

  “That it is,” I agreed. “Come on, let’s head back.”

  She turned to look one more time as we reached the stairs.

  The drizzling rain continued as we headed for home. I was a little jealous of Halli’s raincoat; it was a smart choice here in Seattle. My pea coat and clothing were completely soaked through by the time we reached the shelter of the Underground. I bet Seth’s short cowboy duster kept him dry, I thought with just a twinge of jealousy.

  Seth and Alec were home, but no Johnathan. The sun was just hovering over the water, painting the clouds with colors of pink and orange; it would soon be dark out. “Maybe we should go look for him,” I suggested.

  “We thought about that,” Alec said. “But, neither of us has any idea where he might have gone. Do you?”

  “No, I have no idea.”

  “Maybe we can track him with a tracking spell,” Seth suggested.

  I thought about that. We had the necklaces set up so when one of us summoned the group using our connection, we could easily locate the summoner. It became somewhat more involved and difficult without being summoned.

  “Okay, we’ll give him until morning. I’m sure he’s fine; he just needs some space right now.” I sounded more confident than I felt. My stomach churned with worry.


  There was some good news, thankfully. Alec and Seth had been able to convince Joe to help us sign up for school. He said he’d find someone to act as a parent; he couldn’t do it himself because he was too recognizable. He told them to give him two days and he should have someone to play the part.

  Our sleeping schedules were all messed up. None of us had had much sleep in the last couple of days. We all decided to try to get some now. Even though my body was desperate for sleep, my mind, once again, had other ideas. I couldn’t turn it off. I kept going over the things I’d read at the library and the soul-gaze connection my subconscious mind insisted was there.

  I finally gave up and dragged myself over to a table that was out of the way of everyone else’s sleeping areas. I sat down with the white book and concentrated for a second to increase the brightness of the star-bright in my hand from a dim-light-to-keep-me-from-stepping-on-someone-or-something-or-walking-into-a-table-brightness, to a read-without-straining-my-eyes-too-bad-brightness.

  I opened the book to the section on soul-gazing. I’d read this section at least a couple times before. None of us had tried it yet. I don’t think any of us wanted the others to know what was in our souls. The book said that once you saw inside someone, you never forgot what you saw or learned. One passage caught my eye: The soul-gaze was discovered and used in the beginning to cleanse the soul of one possessed by daemons. It is a dangerous process that requires a great amount of concentration—sometimes taking many hours of being locked together in the gaze. It is rarely—if ever—used in this manner anymore.

  I read the passage again. That book at the library compared lycanthropy to being possessed by demons. That was the connection. Maybe I could cure Johnathan with a soul-gaze! I slammed my fist on the table. “Yes!” I hissed. That had to be the answer.

  I pulled out the paper with my notes from the library and started a list.