But Mom wasn’t among them. She’d raced up to George Standingready with Twyla at her side to make a last stand against Adriel, but they weren’t alone. The old man was standing in front of the wispy images of more than two dozen spirits, two dozen First Nations ghosts called back from the great beyond to fight one last time. Each was dressed in deer or buffalo hides and each wore a bone bead choker like Twyla.
And every last one of them was banging on a deerskin drum.
George Standingready took a step forward and cried out in his native tongue. A spinning wall of snow whipped up from the ground at his feet and flew straight into the black witches. It swirled around them, creating a massive snow squall and Adriel’s minions disappeared from my sight.
But it didn’t matter. Adriel had me in a death grip and then with the tiniest whisper of magic, she summoned her Demon Shade, her familiar that had attacked me at the school. It rose up to its full, massive height and it roared in an unholy voice that seemed to shake the sky itself.
“Julie!” my mother screamed as she summoned up a blast of energy that hit the creature in the chest and sent it tumbling into Adriel. I felt the binding begin to loosen just a little and that’s when the Demon Shade lunged at me. I was about to shut my eyes and say goodbye to the world when Mom leaped into the creature’s path and bore the full brunt of its assault. It enveloped her entirely; its shining black liquid-like body spread across her chest and up over her neck. It was just about to close over Mom’s face when suddenly eight tendrils of pure magic flew into the creature. Behind me I could hear chanting in the old Theban language – the white witches were somehow counterattacking.
“What is this?” roared Adriel as her binding loosened further. I spun around to see my mother’s eyes pleading for help as she gulped for air.
And still the drum beat echoed through the night.
Adriel had dropped her guard long enough for me to make my move. With one final dip into my spirit, I bellowed the most hated death curse in witchcraft and whipped both hands in the black mage’s direction. Witchfire smashed into Adriel dead-on. She immediately lit ablaze, the spell latching onto her magical signature. The flames wouldn’t stop burning until her heart stopped: her ass was grass.
Or so I thought.
“Marcus!” Twyla shrieked. “Oh my God, Marcus jumped into the weir!”
I had an impossible choice. If I released Adriel from my binding of witchfire she could easily compel everyone still under the magic of her coven to jump into the river. If I didn’t release her, she’d burn to a crisp and die. Her enthralment spell would die with her and so would Marcus.
But two things happened in that short moment that I will carry with me to my grave. As Adriel shrieked in unimaginable pain I watched in awe as every one of the First Nations spirits shape-shifted into bison. I also caught a glimpse of Betty the dog as she leaped into the weir after Marcus, disappearing from my sight entirely.
The ground began to tremble as George Standingready once more cried out. The small herd of bison was on the move. They barreled at breakneck speed past the circle of white witches, crashing through bramble and thickets of diamond willow. Their hoofs thundered against the frozen ground and the air was filled with the sound of terrified screams. They rushed forward, an unstoppable force hot on the heels of Adriel’s blood coven. The blood witches’ spells fizzled out as the herd of bison trampled through a group of them and straight into the heart of Adriel’s coven. And the animals were quick – in seconds they had slammed into nearly every one of Adriel’s minions, trampling dozens of them under their massive hooves. They circled, going after a handful of stragglers, whose fate was sealed the moment George Standingready cried out his command to charge.
I turned my attention to the black mage Adriel as witchfire consumed her entire essence and with her dying breath, the now-smoldering husk gazed up at me and whispered a single word.
“Suffer,” Adriel gasped.
In an instant, the Demon Shade that was killing my mother by inches disappeared and I looked downstream to see the bodies of Adriel’s coven carried away by the current. All around us the students and staff of Crescent Ridge High School woke up to find themselves standing on the edge of the Bow River, including Mike Olsen and Willard Schubert, who was squatting at the base of the weir shivering madly.
“Mom,” I cried. “Mom we’ve got to do something to save Marcus, he went over the weir!” I raced up to the river’s edge and spotted Betty and Marcus lying together on the sand about twenty yards from the weir. I cried out with joy. Somehow Betty had managed to save Marcus, somehow she had found the strength to fight the raging undertow of the Bow River weir to save him.
And it had cost her dearly.
After limping through a maze of confused and bewildered students and staff, I made it over to the pair. Marcus was shivering violently, so I threw off my Shadowcull’s cloak and wrapped it around his chest as I turned my attention to Betty. She lay with her head against Marcus’s lap; one of her legs was broken and there was a large gash on her stomach. A small trickle of blood pooled in the freezing water and I knew at that precise moment that there was nothing I could do for the old dog.
“She s-saved me,” Marcus said through his chattering teeth. “My m-mind was filled with nightmare images and suddenly a voice came into my head and told me to hang on tight. W-what just happened, Julie?”
“Adriel happened,” I whispered as I gazed at the dying animal. I knelt down beside the Great Dane and placed my head against its damp chest. Its body heat warmed my face and I could hear its giant heart slowly thumping away. I ran my hand down its back in a series of gentle strokes and the Dane whimpered as it made a weak attempt to wag its tail.
“Good dog,” I whispered as my eyes filled with tears. “You’re such a good dog. I don’t know if you’re in there or not, Betty, but you saved him. You saved Marcus… Damn.”
The tears rolled down my burning cheeks as I hummed a quiet melody and continued to gently stroke the dog’s back. It lingered on for another few minutes or so and I stayed by its side, my face against its rib cage and my right ear listening to the weak beating of its heart until the sound finally faded away.
Mom arrived with Wallace Guffman close behind her. She began to tend to Marcus and in the distance I could see Twyla and George Standingready leading the throng of students and staff to the parking lot of the bird sanctuary. Marcus raised himself up on his elbows and tried to move.
Only nothing happened.
He dug his elbows into the freezing mud and pulled backward with all his strength and he only managed to pull himself a few inches.
We’d grown up together. We’d laughed and played together as children. We’d fought the darkest of powers together and we’d fallen in love with each other in the process.
But there would be no spell or potion in the world to help Marcus Guffman now. That tumble over the weir had cost more than the life of a Great Dane that was host to my spiritual guardian. Marcus looked down and my heart sank because I knew what he was going to say next.
“I can’t… I can’t move my legs,” he whispered.
CHAPTER 26
“Suffer.”
That was the last thing a centuries-old black mage said to me before she had died at my hands.
And she was right.
Mom and Betty had warned me about the danger to Marcus if we continued to see each other. I’d ignored those warnings. I’d stupidly announced that I could protect Marcus from danger, only I was wrong. Something broke inside me that night on the banks of the Bow River because for the first time in my life, I realized just how much like my mother I truly was.
She couldn’t protect my father and he had died. I couldn’t protect Marcus and now he was paying the price for my mistake. I thought that if he’d stayed home, if he stayed away from the dance that he would be safe. But Adriel had access to the legal names of everyone at school. It hadn’t mattered that Marcus was at home. It was through their true name
s that she was able to infect them all with Soul Worms. Mike Olsen and Travis Butler were just the warm-up to the big show on the longest night of the year.
But at least Marcus was alive, right? That had to count for something. I kept telling myself that as I went to visit him at the Rockyview Hospital. I found him alone inside his room sitting in a wheelchair and looking outside his window as the snow collected on the window ledge.
“Hey,” I said as I stood in the doorway. He was wearing a pale blue hospital gown and he turned in his chair to look at me. I was expecting to see the face of an enraged Marcus and a pair of accusing eyes, but that didn’t happen. He simply threw me a slight nod.
“Hi,” he said quietly. “You can come in, Julie.”
I unzipped my winter coat and placed it on the chair next to the bed and then I went to him. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around his bony shoulders and let out a series of painful sobs.
“I’m so sorry, Marcus,” I whispered in his ear. “This wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me.”
He nodded slowly. “This is temporary. I’ve got movement in my legs now.”
A wave of relief washed over me and I said, “This should never have happened… I thought you would be safe if you stayed away from the school.”
He gave me a tiny shrug and looked down at his legs. “But it did happen and there’s nothing that either of us can do about it. Mom and Dad want to keep me under lock and key now… I’m all they’ve got.”
“Next to my mother, you’re all I’ve got, Marcus. Thank God for Betty.” I replied.
Marcus wheeled his chair back to the window and gazed out onto the streets below. “That night was a turning point, I think,” he said slowly.
I pulled up a chair next to him and took a seat. “In what way?”
He kept his eyes fixed on the traffic speeding up Glenmore Trail. I saw his jaw tighten and what Marcus told me next sent me reeling. “In that I’ve known you all my life and I love you with all my heart, but things change, Julie.”
My throat tightened up as a tremor of fear shot through the center of my chest. I placed my hand on his right knee like I’d done so many times before and was about to give it a tiny squeeze when Marcus spun his chair around to face me.
“Don’t,” he said firmly. “Not now, Julie. Not ever again. If you love me like you say you do, then you won’t touch me. You won’t talk to me. You won’t try to send me text messages and you will stay away from me.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came. I searched Marcus’s eyes for something that would give me a tiny glimmer of hope, something, anything that I could grab onto as a lifeline. He wheeled his chair back a few feet as I studied his face. His mouth was nothing more than a line just above his chin and he didn’t even attempt to avoid my gaze.
“Marcus, w-what happened to you?” I choked, forcing back tears that were stinging my eyes.
He sighed loudly and said, “You happened. Everything about your life happened. Someone took over my mind and in those moments when I was standing over the edge of the weir, I saw things. Horrible, twisted and vile things that I can’t even begin to describe – they’re just too awful to contemplate. And I saw my own end, Julie. I saw my death and it came at your hands.”
“B-but…” I said, gulping for air.
He wheeled his chair past his bed and over to the door. “You need to leave, Julie,” Marcus said, his voice shaking. His face was a ghastly shade of white and I noticed that he was trembling. Not out of anger or frustration, but out of fear. “All my life I’ve seen you do wondrous, incredible things that no scientist could ever explain. But someone took over my mind, Julie; Adriel took my mind and my body along with more than a hundred other people. She did this as easily as a person draws breath into their lungs. I’d never known what evil truly was until what happened to me – what happened to all of us. You need to leave me because I don’t have the strength in my heart to spend another minute alone with you. I’m terrified that I’ll take back everything I’ve just said because you have always been the center of my entire universe. You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known and if I stay with you, if I stay as your boyfriend then what I saw will come to pass. Please, Julie, just go!”
I stood up and my legs were like rubber. I made one last futile attempt to find some tiny speck of affection in Marcus’s eyes, but there was nothing but fear. He loved me with all his heart, but something happened to him back at the weir. He’d caught a glimpse of his own death, but at my hands? I loved Marcus. He was the first boy I’d ever held hands with. He was my first kiss, my best friend and biggest supporter.
And now he was terrified of me.
I could feel my heart break in two as I somehow mustered the strength to leave the hospital room. My mind was spinning, I felt like I was going to throw up and it was everything I could do to make it down the hall to the elevator without falling to the cold tile floor and weeping.
I cried for an entire day because there was nothing else I could do. Even Mom tried to offer some measure of comfort and to her credit, she didn’t say anything stupid like, “It’s all for the best.” Instead, she simply brought me a cup of tea every few hours as a reason to check in on me. And the entire time as I lay on my bed, my body aching from sobbing into my pillow, I wondered what precisely Marcus saw in his vision. He was going to die at my hands? Me? That’s the part that really stung me the most because I’d gladly lay down my life to protect him.
What did he see? What kind of horrible, corrupted vision of the future would compel him to break off all contact with me? I needed answers so I went back to the weir to look for them. I had to.
This was the place where everything had changed and the crushing guilt of what had happened to Marcus weighed heavily on my shoulders like a stack of stones. As I wandered up the path I could hear the sound of water crashing over the weir. In the week that passed since that terrible night, more than a foot of snow had fallen on the city, erasing every trace of the epic battle that had been fought on the banks of the river. In the distance I spotted a familiar figure walking along the river’s edge. It was Twyla Standingready and she was kicking at the snow with the heel of her boot.
I raced up to her and threw my arms around her. “Twyla! I hope your grandfather is OK.”
She hugged me back and then tugged at her toque to cover her ears. “He’s good, a little bit heartbroken though. I had no idea he’d once had a love affair with a witch named Wilma. He’s always been a secretive person – that’s a hell of a secret to keep all these years. How is Marcus?”
“He’s fighting the good fight,” I lied, as we started walking up toward the weir. A gentle coat of ice crystals covered our parkas as we plodded through the snow. “We’ve decided to stop seeing each other – it’s too dangerous. The good news is that he can move his legs.”
Twyla exhaled in relief, “Thank the spirits. It could have been far worse for him.”
I pushed back the urge to tell her the truth, deciding instead to change the subject. “That was an amazing display of magic by your grandfather. He’s one powerful practitioner – both of you are.”
She nodded. “That he is. I’m not entirely sure how he did it and he’s not telling me… Yet. Apparently I have a lot more to learn.”
“Same with me,” I replied as my eyes shifted toward something poking out of the snow. “Hey, what’s that?”
We walked up to the object and saw that it was the burlap sack that Adriel had been carrying. Twyla was about to grab it when I slapped her hand away.
“What the hell was that for?” she choked.
“It might be protected by a spell,” I said as I held out my hand. I concentrated for a few seconds to see if I could detect any magic and there was none so I started kicking at the ice encasing the base of the pouch with the heel of my boot. In seconds it was free so I picked it up and pulled back the top flap.
Inside was the last thing I was expecting to find. It was a
small wooden tablet and when I pulled it out to examine it, the sheer magnitude of what I was holding hit me with explosive force.
“What is it?” asked Twyla. “It’s got weird-ass writing on it.”
I clutched the tablet tightly in my gloved hands and just gawked at it for few more seconds.
“It’s written using the Theban alphabet, the original language of witches everywhere.”
“Alright,” Twyla huffed. “Thanks for the quick history lesson, but again: what is it?”
A twinge of panic shot through me and I quickly slipped the tablet back into the pouch. I placed a hand on Twyla’s shoulder and said, “It’s a page from the Book of Names, a powerful artefact that gives whoever holds it the ability to bind anyone to their will. There are three tablets, one made of wood, another made from stone and the last one is made from parchment. The lettering on this tablet carries the true names of players in the supernatural world and now I understand why Adriel wanted to wipe out my mother’s coven.”
She blinked. “I’m all ears. What’s your theory?”
I narrowed my eyes as I clutched the satchel tightly in my hands. “It’s not a theory – remember what that Demon Shade told us outside of the school just before I torched it? Adriel was after one or both of the other pieces of the puzzle. This was never about taking down the coven, it was about acquiring the Book of Names the entire time. I think that’s why my father was killed, Twyla. I think he found out the truth and it cost him his life.”
Her eyes panned down to the satchel and if she’d had any inkling of trying to keep the tablet, she’d have made a move to take it from me.
But not Twyla Standingready. She took a step forward and looked me square in the eye.
“You have to hide it, Julie. Somewhere nobody will ever think of looking for it. If you take it to your house then someone will come after you and your mother. No, that thing is too dangerous to be left to anyone associated with your order of witches. But the power of my people can keep it hidden.”
Student Bodies Page 20
