Student Bodies

by Sean Cummings

  “And parents are partly to blame. Having forgotten what it’s like to be fifteen, they seek out information on how to help their little darlings survive each day. There are talk shows and books and radio phone-in programs devoted to the subject. There are gazillions of websites and government programs that are supposed to help parents teach their children how to cope… But, Julie, I mean, how to cope? Coping means that you’ve accepted being a victim and besides, there is nothing those websites and bullying programs could have taught me because there is only one strategy that actually works and it has to do with moving away to another school and hoping that it doesn’t start up again.”

  This was the first time that Marcus had ever opened up to me about something so deeply personal. He’d given me a heartbreaking explanation of how bullying affected his life and I was so proud of him for trusting me enough to talk about it. It took a tremendous amount of courage for Marcus to share this terrible, dark secret with me. A secret that was laced with a sense of hopelessness because like it or not, he was right. Everybody at every school knows who the bullies are and no amount of intervention is going to stop it from happening any time soon.

  And that’s when I gently placed my hands on his cheeks and gazed into his eyes. “I love you, Marcus,” I whispered. “I honest-to-God love you with all my heart.”

  He kissed me softly and then wrapped his arms around me. “I love you too, Julie,” he said quietly.

  CHAPTER 15

  We climbed into Mom’s car shortly after six in the evening with me in the passenger seat and Marcus stuffed into the back alongside a panting Betty the dog. We’d shared the information we found on Mike and Travis’s Facebook pages and it was all we could do to stop my mother from calling the school right then and there.

  “How in the hell could the staff not know about this kind of harassment?” she snarled as the car bounced down the snowy streets.

  “It’s really complicated, Mom,” I answered. “I imagine there are rules about teachers who check out their students’ Facebook pages.”

  Betty sneezed from the back seat. It was followed quickly by Marcus cursing under his breath. “And how is this Willard Schubert involved in that boy’s death? Clearly he couldn’t have killed him, so what is his role?”

  I shook my head and stared out onto busy Deerfoot Trail as Mom pressed the accelerator. Her car snapped into a higher gear as I sunk back into my seat. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? He’s a piece of a much larger puzzle.”

  Mom reached over and turned up the heat. Frost was forming on the windshield because she hadn’t taken the time to warm up the car properly. “Your father might have something say about it… He’d better,” she said threateningly.

  And so we drove on along the busy freeway. I gazed out at the weir and noticed the ice fog drifting above the splashing water as the Bow River flowed over the makeshift dam and I wondered for a short moment just how much energy was being produced by the thousands of gallons of water each minute that poured over the blunt spillway.

  Then it hit me. Energy. Black magic requires a hell of a lot of energy – malicious energy, possibly even a blood sacrifice. A practitioner would have had to possess a tremendous amount of power to enthral two people in as many days; to suppress their victim’s survival instincts to the point where the target could be compelled to end his or her life. But why those two people? Why Mike Olsen and Travis Butler? Why not the Mayor or the weather lady on the evening news?

  No, Mike and Travis had been selected for a reason and what better way to fuel a spell than to draw on someone else’s ill-feeling? Willard Schubert must be someone who carried a boatload of it. After all, he’d been the target of a humiliation conspiracy since the first day of classes. Maybe this black mage was drawing on the malice that Willard held toward his tormentors.

  Could Willard Schubert hate that much? Could he possibly be a fountain of malice that could provide a black mage with an energy source to fuel his vile plans?

  And he was seeing a shrink to learn how to deal with his anger. Willard sure as hell had every reason to hate and I couldn’t blame him one bit if that hate morphed into malice, but he would have had to make some kind of dark bargain with a practitioner to take down the pair of them – assuming he could actually find a magical bad guy. I’m a witch and even I don’t yet know who all the good guys and bad guys are. If I didn’t have a clue, Willard wouldn’t either.

  We drove on for another fifteen minutes and eventually the gates of the Prince of Peace Cemetery came into view, so Mom parked the car on 4th Street and we all climbed out. The moon was fat and full and the night sky was a blanket of twinkling stars. This was the first time I was going to meet with my father and mother at the same time. My Dad, as mentioned before, is a ghost. He lingers on in the mortal realm; bound to the confines of the Prince of Peace Cemetery until my mother joins him in the afterlife. He’s the one who gave me my Shadowcull’s band – of course we had to dig it out of his empty grave first. He was also the one who started telling me the truth of what my life was to become; that I was to follow in his footsteps as a Shadowcull.

  Since the battle with the Witchfinder General, I’d been visiting the cemetery under the cover of darkness to meet with him; to reconnect with the one missing piece of the puzzle known as Julie Richardson. He’d been dead since I was four and we had ten years-worth of catching up to do.

  But not on this night.

  The wind kicked up curls of snow that twisted between the hundreds of headstones stretching out before us in tidy rows. All around me the spirits of the departed who still clung to the mortal world appeared and disappeared; their vaporous forms keeping vigil on their final resting places. Marcus slipped his gloved hand into mine as the snow crunched loudly beneath our feet. Betty took the lead, followed closely behind by Mom. She was dressed in her Hudson’s Bay coat; the fur-trimmed hood covered her head to protect her face from the freezing wind.

  Moments later, I felt my father’s presence. Each spirit carries with them the spiritual imprint of the person they were in life. It’s why ghosts manifest looking exactly like the person they once were right down to the clothes they wore at the moment of death. This was the first time Marcus had come back to the cemetery – the last time we were here, we came under attack from a monster comprised of body parts from the graves. He’d seen me don my Shadowcull’s band for the first time and his mind was blown by the fact that for a short while, I actually managed to defy gravity using a spell called the volatilis. But there wouldn’t be any floating witches on this night. We came to the cemetery for answers and it was high time that my father provided them.

  We spotted my father’s vaporous form sitting atop his headstone, dressed in the last thing he’d worn when he was alive: a Spider-Man T-shirt, shorts and socks with sandals. As we approached, his visage flickered; then he turned to face us and threw us a wave.

  “Uh-oh,” he said with a smirk on his face. “This looks like trouble. It’s a damned cold night to be wandering around a cemetery. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Being dead is boring as hell, but at least I don’t feel the cold.”

  Marcus and I stopped about twenty feet from his grave as Mom walked through the snow until she stood in front of him. She lowered her hood and then held out her hands, palms-up.

  “Hello, Stephen,” she said with a hint of sadness in her voice. My father’s spirit drifted off the headstone and hovered before her. He held his ghostly hands over my mother’s open palms and then a warm golden glow appeared between them.

  “What are they doing, Julie?” Marcus whispered.

  “It’s an embrace,” I whispered back. “This is what undying love looks like, Marcus, and it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  The supernatural glow intensified, bathing both their forms in shimmering golden light. My eyes filled with tears as I watched my parents bridge the gap between the world of the living and the great beyond. My mother’s magical signature humm
ed as the pair rekindled their bond, proving that not even death itself could separate them.

  “We need your help,” she said quietly as her hands dropped to her sides. “Something terrible has happened.”

  Dad drifted back to his headstone and said, “I know. They’re preparing a grave for a kid’s funeral tomorrow. I expect it’s why you’re here.”

  Mom nodded. “Soul Worms. The boy that will be buried here tomorrow was infected with them and we’re convinced there’s a black mage on the loose. We need to know if it’s someone you once knew.”

  My father’s visage disappeared and then reappeared only a few feet in front of me. “Hiya, baby girl… and a boyfriend, now? Jeez, I’d get all choked up here, but you know, I’m dead and all.”

  Marcus snorted. “Creepiest family ever.”

  “Tell me about it,” Dad groaned. “A talking dog, a pair of witches and a ghost. There’s a Tim Burton movie in all of this, I swear.”

  Betty chimed in. “So, you know about the boy who was killed?”

  Dad nodded. “Yeah, and a big cluster of residual energy floating around the city to boot. This bears all the earmarks of someone I once knew – Adriel. Nasty-ass black mage, she was. A hewer of the living spirit that dwells in children, she fed on the death energy from each of her kills, nourishing her spirit and keeping her alive well past her best-before date. I wasn’t much older than Julie when they sent me out to take her down and I barely survived our encounter. She was too powerful for me and the best I could do was to lay a mark on her spirit so that I could always tell when she was coming – sort of the Shadowcull equivalent of the Mark of Cain. Unfortunately my spell disappeared from Adriel’s spirit the moment I kicked the bucket.”

  “Adriel,” Betty rumbled. “I know that name and I’ve not heard it in a long, long time. She coveted that which she could never obtain no matter how many children she’d killed. She wanted to be an immortal.”

  I shuddered at my father’s revelation. A black mage who killed children? Someone who taps their victim’s living energy at the moment of death so they can keep on living? The implications were massive; no wonder my father couldn’t defeat this Adriel in a duel to the death, she’d been killing for hundreds of years and that meant hundreds of years to perfect her craft.

  “She’ll have an adherent, a second that she’s put in place to scope out the lay of the land,” my father said ominously. “She’ll also have blood coven witches who’ve sworn a blood oath of allegiance to her. Each one will possess enough skill to lay a death curse that will stop your heart where you stand.”

  “I think you’re right, Dad,” I said as my heart sank a little. “Last night I went to question the boy who survived and a police car was parked in front of his house. I think the cop was a practitioner. There was malice dripping out of that cop car.”

  Dad appeared to sigh heavily and he gave my mother a hopeless look. “Donna, you know what this means.”

  My mother glanced at me over her shoulder and from the grim look on her face I understood what my father was saying. A skilled black mage is one thing, but a blood coven was another thing entirely. I’d have my hands full just trying to survive a showdown with Adriel and I didn’t stand a ghost of a chance against a blood coven of witches.

  Marcus coughed. “Blood covens are bad, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s a nightmare scenario. Witches who’ve bound their fate to that of their Maven by spilling their own blood and taking the blood vow. They’ll sacrifice their immortal souls to protect her. It’s more than a single Shadowcull can handle.”

  “And that means?” he asked.

  Mom spun around in the snow to face me. Her eyes narrowed and she said, “It means that I must contact my coven and plea for their help. It means that we’re going to have to begin preparations immediately.”

  “Preparations for what?” asked Marcus.

  I turned to face him and took his hands in mine. “Everyone is in danger. I can see it now as clear as day. Adriel is here for one reason, to kill as many students as she possibly can. If Betty is right, she means to make a bid for her own immortality. Tomorrow night is the Christmas dance and that’s where she’s going to make her move – Mike Olsen and Travis Butler were the equivalent of Adriel dipping her toe in the water to check the temperature. She wanted to see who might try to stop her and you can be certain she knows there’s a Shadowcull in this city because she probably caught a whiff of my magic when we saved Mike from getting splattered by the C-Train.”

  We came to the cemetery for answers and we got them. “This is my past and your future, kiddo,” Dad said quietly. “You know what you have to do, Donna.”

  Mom heaved a weary sigh and stared at me, grim-faced. “We don’t have a minute to waste. The winter solstice is tomorrow night. The Wheatland coven is going to be busy getting everything ready for the ritual of Yule. They’re the only people who can stand up to Adriel’s blood coven and they won’t see her coming. I have to warn them.”

  A panic seized me. “She might attack when the witches are at their weakest, when they’re divided and distracted. She’s already killed one student; a gymnasium filled with a hundred students makes a hell of a good distraction.”

  Betty rumbled. “Spirits bless us all; the girl has a lick of sense about her. A black mage who gathers power by killing children? Two boys infected with Soul Worms in as many days and one of them dead? Adriel is going to infect every student who goes to that dance! A magical assault that is sure to draw out the only people in the city that might be able to save them – a coven of white witches.”

  “She’ll be ruthless,” said my father. “And it’s a damned blessing you figured it out with time to prepare some kind of plan to save those kids. Go now, all of you. Get the hell out of this cemetery and contact the coven – their lives and the lives of those students depend on it.”

  “But, Dad, what about–”

  “Go now!” he shouted, his voice echoed through the darkness. “You have to warn them!”

  I looked at my mother and could tell that she was visibly shaken. Marcus squeezed my hand and Betty took off running down the snow-covered hill in the direction of Mom’s car.

  And so we raced through a ghost-filled cemetery on one of the coldest nights of the year. The winter solstice was a day away and we had to warn the coven before it was too late.

  All the pieces of the puzzle fit together now. Less than a week to go before Christmas and Santa wasn’t bringing presents to the students of Crescent Ridge High School.

  He was bringing death.

  CHAPTER 16

  We took Marcus home.

  We had to.

  The clock was ticking and the safest place for him was to remain as far the hell away from me as humanly possible. And this time he didn’t kick up a fuss because he knew the terrifying plot we’d uncovered made my battle with the Witchfinder General seem like a summer tea party by comparison. But was Marcus really safe? Was anyone?

  I didn’t have a clue what this Adriel looked like or where she might be hiding, and at this stage of the game it didn’t matter. There was no time to conduct a search for a black mage who’d been operating from the shadows for possibly hundreds of years. No, our task this night was to make contact with the Wheatland coven and warn them of the impending attack. Lives hung in the balance – the students’, the witches’, my mother’s and even my own.

  Coven House, the temple for the Wheatland Coven of White Witches dates back to the late eighteen hundreds; a period of massive expansion in the Canadian west. When Canada became a country in 1867, the entire prairie region was nothing more than a collection of trading posts. It was inhabited by indigenous peoples, proud First Nations’ tribes like the Blackfoot and the Assiniboine, the Sioux and the Peigan. Millions of buffalo roamed free in a land that was unspoiled since time began. Everything changed when European settlers moved in thanks to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A ribbon of steel stretched out across the pra
irie to the mountains and settlers were wooed to the west by promises of free land. And so they came by the thousands. By 1890, towns took shape, and my hometown of Calgary was one of them. Among those settlers from Europe came witches from places like England and Ireland but also from eastern European countries like Hungary and the Ukraine. They formed covens just as they had in the old country, a new generation of witches in a new land full of promise and hope.

  The gathering place for the Wheatland coven was inside the old Unitarian Church on Bowness Road. I’d never visited the place and this was to be my first time in the company of a witch that wasn’t my mother. It was shortly past 9pm when we pulled up in front of the old sandstone building. I gazed out the window to see a wrought iron fence with a large arched gate. A serpentine walkway that had been scraped clean of snow and ice led to a large concrete stairway and a pair of oak doors that had to be at least ten feet tall.

  “Are you ready for this, Mom?” I asked as I fiddled with my Shadowcull’s band. “It’s been a long time for you. I hope there aren’t any bad feelings from when you left.”

  Mom clenched her jaw tightly and drew in a deep breath of air. She cocked an eyebrow and glanced at me self-consciously. “You don’t know the half of it, Julie. I see a light in the upstairs window, the Maven is here. When we go inside, you’ll refer to her as ‘Blessed Maven’. You’ll not speak unless you’re spoken to and you’ll be mindful not to touch anything. You don’t have that right. Jesus, I don’t have that right, either. Do you understand?”

  I turned my head to the back seat. “What about Betty? Is she coming?”

  The enormous dog snorted. “Let the Maven try and stop me.”

  “I take that as a yes. OK, let’s go,” I said nervously.

  We climbed out of the car and walked up to the gate. There was a small bell with a drawstring so my mother gave it a pull and it rang out once. I saw a fluttering of movement behind a curtain from the upstairs window and then a ripple of magical energy washed over me. The Maven gave off a magical signature of such intensity that it dwarfed mine or my mother’s and I shuddered for a moment at the idea of what might happen if our meeting didn’t go terribly well. Mom had left the coven; there was bound to be some resentment even after all these years. I could only hope that whatever ill-will was between Mom and the Maven could be put aside, because the coven was in grave danger.