Shadow Witch Rising (Copper Falls Book 1)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “Hey! I'm so glad you stopped by,” she greeted Sophie.

  “I meant to call but I was all —” she wiggled her fingers, illustrating how absent-minded she was feeling, “today.”

  Thea laughed. “Don't worry about it. Drop in any time. We're your people too. You're welcome here, kiddo.”

  Sophie smiled, warmed by her former teacher's words. “Thanks.”

  “I gathered up a bunch of things I found about Migisi, and I made copies of a few things I thought you might like to have.”

  “Oh my gosh. You're amazing,” Sophie said, taking Thea's hand.

  Thea laughed. “Oh, I know I am,” she said, squeezing Sophie's hand. “Come on in.”

  They headed back inside the building, and Thea led her back to her cramped, cozy little office.

  “Any luck on the journals?” she asked Sophie.

  Sophie sat down. “She and Luc were together for a while, it looks like. She was pregnant, and she lost it.”

  Thea stilled, watched Sophie. “Really?”

  Sophie nodded. “She also wrote about how her magic was failing, that she felt the darkness encroaching.”

  “Shadow?”

  “I think so. Which points to the idea of her going dark before she cursed Luc. Maybe she was just too far gone by the time that happened.”

  “What caused it, though?”

  “I really wish I knew,” Sophie answered quietly.

  Thea sat in the chair behind her desk, studying Sophie. “Is this happening to you, Sophie? Is the Shadow encroaching?”

  “I feel wrong. I don't know why.”

  “Does your magic still work?”

  Sophie nodded. “It's more difficult than usual at times, but it works.”

  Thea studied her for a few moments, then shook her head.

  “Tell me about Migisi the Mad. Please,” she added.

  Thea set the file she'd been holding down on the desk. “Migisi the Mad. The story goes that there was a great healer among us, of our people. That she could heal anything. That she could keep us from starving even in the worst of times. That the only reason this particular community didn't succumb completely to the diseases brought by the white man was because of her care and protection. She saved us, when so many others perished.” She paused. “I dislike speaking of this. She should be remembered as she was. And we don't know how much of the Migisi the Mad tale is actually true,” she hastened to add.

  Sophie nodded. “Please.”

  “The story goes that Migisi was our healer. Our strength. We depended on her. Maybe we depended on her too much. Maybe we helped break her.” Thea paused, and her shame was plain on her face, as if she, generations removed, was personally to blame. She went on. “One day, she was our beloved. And then she was gone. No one saw her, and the tribe feared her dead. But she wasn't. When she reappeared, she was no longer the healer we loved. She was angry. Cold. She wanted nothing to do with the people who relied on her. She became a hermit, only occasionally coming to the villages, where, it was said, she'd look around and then leave. Children started disappearing,” she said, glancing at Sophie. “Children who were a little different.” Her expression closed down, as if she'd said too much.

  “You know what I am,” Sophie said quietly.

  After a moment, Thea nodded.

  “I know shapeshifters. Witches. Warlocks,” Sophie said. “They were special like that?”

  “Yes,” Thea answered, nodding. “Shapeshifters. From our records, six of them disappeared over a three-year span. Keep in mind, we never did have many. All that we had, we lost. There are no shapeshifters among us now.”

  “And Migisi had something to do with it?” Sophie asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  “We never knew for sure. Tribal history shows that there were debates. The tribe wanted to march on her land, demand our children back. But, ultimately, no one wanted to anger her. The tribe mourned. And we never did see those children the way they were again.”

  “That makes it sound like they were seen again.”

  Thea nodded. “I will find the documents for you for next time. When they were finally returned to us, they were wrong. They couldn't shift back. They were only recognized because their families knew their scents.”

  “Did they act different?” Sophie asked.

  Thea looked at her quizzically. “Different, how?”

  “More violent? Hungrier? Anything like that?”

  “No. None of the records mention anything like that. At least, I don't remember it being part of the reports. I will double check. They just couldn't shift back to their human forms. They did not live much longer after they came back to us.”

  Sophie sat in silence, mourning for children she'd never known. “Migisi did it?”

  “It was assumed she did something. It was months between the time they disappeared and when the tribe got them back.”

  “Did anyone search her land for them?”

  Thea nodded. “Of course. She was powerful. I don't find it very hard to believe that she hid them well.” She picked up the journal Sophie had set on the desk after removing it from her bag, the one with the paintings and drawings in it. She flipped back in the journal, to the painting of the bear. “This has something to do with this, doesn't it?” she asked Sophie, gesturing to the bear.

  “Maybe. I kind of hope not.”

  “Me too. Because if this is the kind of magic we're dealing with, I really don't want to be any part of it.”

  “I'm not trying to replicate it. I'm trying to figure out what went wrong,” Sophie said.

  Thea studied her. “Do you hope to fix it?”

  “If I can,” Sophie replied softly. “I'm not very powerful. But I have to try.”

  “What does it matter to you?” Thea asked, though her voice was gentle. “You're a young woman. You should be living your life, not worrying about a history none of us can change.”

  “Not everything that's in the past remains there, I guess,” Sophie said. “You know who Luc's descendant is. I am as much a fool for him as Migisi once was for Luc. But in our case, I need to save him. This is his family's last chance for salvation.” She took a deep breath, focused on Thea. “Can you trust me? Can I trust you?”

  Thea sighed, then took Sophie's hand in hers. “Until you give me reason not to, I trust you. Know that I will be watching you. And if I even see you so much as looking at one of our children in a funny way, I will do whatever it takes to protect them.”

  “I would never hurt anyone!” Sophie said in shock.

  “Neither would Migisi. And yet…” she said, shrugging. “We need to understand one another. Do we?”

  After a moment, Sophie nodded.

  “Good.” She picked up the folder again. “Here are those documents I found.” She got up and sat next to Sophie, opened the folder. The first paper she took out was a photocopy of an old photograph of a Native American woman. She was stunning. The photo showed the woman in profile, and she was looking up slightly. She was dressed, it looked like, in leathers, and a beaded headband with traditional Ojibwa symbols. Her hair flowed down in two long braids over her shoulders. In it, Sophie recognized her own nose, slightly pointed, yet a little flat. The woman's narrow chin was also something Sophie saw in the mirror every day.

  “Migisi?” she whispered, unable to take her eyes off of the photo.

  “Yes. This is the only known photograph of her. It was taken in 1860.”

  “That was after she met Luc,” Sophie murmured.

  “When did they meet again?”

  “1852, according to the journals.”

  “So eight years, at least, she was fine. She was not yet mad when this was taken. This next page is from a newspaper article that this photo accompanied, talking about her accomplishments.”

  Sophie glanced over the article, still holding the photograph in her other hand. “The French really seemed to respect her,” she said.

  “As they should have. She healed many of
them as well, when they fell ill.”

  Sophie leafed through the rest of the folder, which contained mostly newspaper articles and narrated histories of people who'd known Migisi. She kept holding the photograph, but put the rest of the folder on the desk and slumped back in her chair.

  “So she was fine for quite a while. If this was taken in 1860, she'd known him for at least eight years by this point,” she said. “How old would she have been here again?”

  “Born in 1827, so 33 or so,” Thea said.

  “She'd lost the baby by this point, and she was already beginning to feel the effects of the Shadow taking her over.” She narrowed her eyes, looked at Thea. “Was it normal for someone to be that age and still single? And still that healthy? She looks so young.”

  Thea laughed. “Not at all. But who was going to argue with her? She was our tribe's healer, our protection. She was married to her magic, to her woods, and our people were understanding of that. Not that there weren't men who wanted her. She had many suitors, our own men and men from other tribes alike. She was described by one Iroquois as “'like a rabid dog, more likely to snap than anything else.' As far as her age, I've heard that your kind, and shapeshifters as well, can be quite long-lived.”

  Sophie laughed, looked at the photo again. “Damn it, Migisi. What went wrong?”

  Thea had picked up the journal of paintings again. “This one is different,” Thea said. Sophie forced her concentration back to the woman and Migisi's journal.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “This drawing. Did you see this one?” Thea asked, tilting the journal toward Sophie. Sophie recognized it immediately, having thought the same thing herself when she'd quickly flipped through the journal.

  “I haven't looked through that one much. I do like the painting of the falls, though.”

  She tore her eyes away from it. The image had made her uncomfortable before, and it made her equally uncomfortable now. Where Migisi's earlier art had been full of color and life, this one was in shades of gray, black, and deep blue. A fall forest, it looked like, brown leaves on the forest floor, trees bare of life. The entire thing looked barren and dark, the branches of the forlorn-looking trees reaching up into a lifeless sky. It had Migisi's style, the line weights typical of her hand based on the other drawings and paintings. The mood was all wrong.

  Thea was studying her, and Sophie looked down at her notes.

  “Did you notice that this one has a title?” Thea finally asked. Sophie looked back at the book, to where Thea was pointing. There, at the base of the tree, what Sophie had mistaken as leaf litter, was writing. Not French.

  “What does it say?” Sophie asked.

  “Niboowin. It is our word for death.”

  “Lovely,” Sophie said, looking away from the drawing again.

  “It gets worse. Did you notice the writing on the back of it?” Thea asked.

  “There was some scribbling back there. Those are actually words?”

  Thea nodded. “Again, in our language. Hm,” she said with a frown. “Well, that isn't good.” She glanced up at Sophie. “The darkness rises,” she said with a grimace.

  Sophie sat, feeling numb.

  “So it was Luc she destroyed,” Thea said, trying to piece it all together. “What does that have to do with the painting? With this one?” She flipped back to the one of the bear on the rock.

  “That's Luc,” Sophie said.

  “Oh,” Thea said, as if she was beginning to understand it all. “Oh good god.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sophie. What did she do to him? This is why you're here. What happened?” Thea asked. “What does that curse do?”

  “She cursed him, and even now, his line suffers with it. His descendant tracked me down and we worked out a deal that I would try to break the curse.”

  “So, Calder is cursed as well?” Thea asked softly. Sophie nodded.

  “What does it do?”

  Sophie stood up and looked out the window. “The cursed feels insatiable hunger. Dissatisfaction. It eats away at them until it slowly but surely drives them insane, because no matter how much they eat, how much sex they have, how much water they drink… they're never all right. They're never satisfied. The insanity makes it so they forget how to shift back, and they are nothing but a mindless beast, a monster who has ceaseless hunger.”

  The room was silent other than the ticking of the clock over the door for several long moments. “Wendigo,” Thea said.

  Sophie turned to her. “What?”

  “She based the curse on the wendigo. Wiindigoo, in our tongue,” Thea said, grabbing a book off of the nearby bookshelf and flipping through it. “Of course, the tale of the wendigo is a warning against the evils of cannibalism. Er. They don't eat people, do they?” she asked, looking at Sophie.

  Sophie shrugged. “Not that I've heard. I know they're violent once they become insane. I guess if they were hungry enough and a human was nearby, they would.”

  Thea gave a small shiver. “All right, well, Migisi would have known of wiindigoo. The thing with the wiindigoo is that once it gets that first taste of human flesh, it hungers endlessly for more. Its hunger is never, ever satisfied. There is no way for it to ever feel satisfied again. It just wants more and more. It was a cautionary tale.”

  Sophie thought. “What we have heard is that Luc cheated on Migisi and she caught him. In her rage, she cursed him and his entire line.”

  Thea nodded slowly. “As if she was saying 'oh, I wasn't enough for you? There'll never be such a thing as enough for you again.'”

  “Right.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  Thea shook her head. “But a curse like that… I mean, I know nothing about witches, so you're going to have to fill me in, but Migisi wasn't that kind of witch, right? She was a healer.”

  Sophie flipped to the back of the drawing of the dark forest, to the words “the darkness rises,” and Thea sighed, her entire body slumping in sadness.

  On that happy note, Sophie gathered the journals, as well as the folder of papers Thea had found for her, and promised to meet up again in a few days' time.

  More questions, and still no answers.

  When she pulled into her driveway, she paid the barest of attention to the stupid rose sitting at the end of her driveway. Instead, she found her attention drawn to Calder, leaning over the engine of Bryce's ugly car.

  She put her car into park, looked out her window toward him, irritated, as if there was something just out of reach, some thought that hadn't quite made its way through, as if there was something she needed to remember, wanted to remember, but couldn't.

  She climbed out of the car and walked across the road, eyes on him. He'd been looking toward her already, and he stood up straight, wiped his hands on a nearby rag.

  “What's wrong?” he asked as she stalked up to him.

  “Nothing,” she murmured, pulling his shirt a little, then standing on tiptoe so she could brush her lips across his. Instantly, his arms were around her, holding her tight to his body, his lips warm and insistent on hers. She let him turn her body, press her up against the side of the car. The sensation of being trapped between his big body and the steel of the car was exactly what she needed. So firm, so real. He buried his fingers in her hair again, and she let out a low moan. He kissed her, then trailed his lips down her chin, her jaw, her throat, and she held him close to her.

  “What happened?” he asked, kissing the side of her neck. “You look spooked. You're all adrenaline right now.”

  She shook her head, held him tighter. He rubbed his cheek against hers, and she closed her eyes. She could feel his heart pounding against her. A tremor went through him.

  “Okay?” she asked him.

  “I think I have to back off a little,” he said, and the regret in his voice made her want him even more. She nodded, and slowly let him go. He took a step back. His jaw was clenched, every muscle tense.

  “I'm sorry,” she sai
d softly.

  “Don't be. I'm going to be replaying you walking across the street and laying that kiss on me over and over in my mind for days.” He gave a tight smile.

  “Should I go?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “I don't want you to. I'm okay. Just don't touch me for a while.”

  “A girl could get insulted by something like that,” she said, trying to shake him out of the frustration she could read all over his face.

  She was rewarded with a wry smile. “You know damn well if I had my way you'd be touching me all the time, kitten.”

  She smiled then, glancing at the car. “Does this help?” she asked, nodding toward it. “Working on stuff like this?”

  He nodded. “It helps to have something concrete to focus on. And it's just kind of rewarding, saving one of those badasses from the scrap heap.”

  She ran her hand over roof of the car. She glanced inside, and the sight of the back seat made her mind go places it probably shouldn't have gone right then. She heard a low growl, and she looked back at Calder. He was staring at her, head lifted, just a bit, as if he was scenting the air.

  “You're driving me insane,” he said, his voice a low, rumbling growl.

  “I have a proposition for you, big guy,” she said, leaning back against the car.

  He groaned. “Sophie….”

  “Why don't you come over to my place? I'll change, light some candles….”

  He was staring at her hungrily. She bit back a smile.

  “And you can help me milk the goats.”

  He shook his head a little, and she burst out laughing. A few seconds later, he was laughing, too. “You are crazy,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” she agreed.

  He stepped toward her again, leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to her lips, and a shiver went through her. He backed off again, eyes on hers. “Beautiful, too.”

  “Now you're just trying to get out of milking,” she said, turning and heading toward her house, a smile on her face. “I see how it is.”

  “Tell you what. I'll try to help you milk if you'll tell me what has you so spooked that you came over here with that look in your eyes.” He had caught up with her, and was walking across the road beside her.