Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  It was the pentagram room. Peter was right. I looked frantically around, but the room was small and empty. There wasn’t a space to conceal Tamsin. It was the same as it had looked last time: black walls, crude drawing of a man with antlers, pentagram on the floor, surrounded by torches at each point. Peter slid past me and stood in the center of the room.

  “She’s not here,” I said with despair.

  “What are they doing here?” he whispered with horror, turning slowly in a circle, taking everything in. “This is beyond anything I imagined.” He no longer sounded charged with the thrill of the hunt. He sounded appalled, and maybe even a little afraid.

  I remembered that Peter didn’t know the things I did and hadn’t seen the things that I had. He thought this was just a bunch of lunatics holed up in the woods doing too many drugs; possibly murderers, possibly not. There was no reason for him to believe they had any real power to inflict the changes they so excitedly discussed on the world at large. But this was physical evidence that they believed they could and were willing to go to great lengths to do so.

  He turned to look at me behind the tapestry. “Sam, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said urgently. “Now. These people are dangerous.” He slid his phone from his pocket and began taking pictures of the room. “I’m taking these to my contact at the police department. I have to hope it will be enough to get the cops here. If Tamsin’s not here, they could have her anywhere, and they’re obviously planning on doing something terrible. We’ve got to stop them.”

  As Peter spoke, I strained to listen to what sounded like the distant sound of a door opening and closing, followed by the sound of voices murmuring. The sound came closer, as though they were coming down the hallway.

  “Peter!” I hissed. “Someone’s coming.”

  Peter ran back to the tapestry and concealed himself behind it next to me. I pressed myself against the wall and inched backwards towards the door.

  “What is this?” I looked over at Peter, who was staring at his phone.

  “Who cares?” I whispered frantically. “We can look at them later, we’ve got to get out of here—” I froze. And fell silent.

  There was the unmistakable massive groaning sound of the wall swinging inward. Peter reached out and grabbed my hand, putting the other in front of his face, a finger to his lips. (Like I needed to be told.)

  The voices grew louder as what sounded like an entire procession filed into the room. There was another groaning, scraping noise as the wall swung shut.

  We were trapped.

  40

  The Dark Coven

  From behind the tapestry, Peter and I listened as the procession filed in. I closed my eyes and tried not to make a sound. I could hear Margo speak over the excited din of voices.

  “Sisters of darkness,” said Margo. “We come together to unite against the ones who have wronged us. And on this eve, by the light of the blood moon, when we are plummeted into permanent midnight by the lunar eclipse—we shall have our revenge!”

  Cheers erupted in the room, echoing around the chamber. Peter looked over at me incredulously. I was afraid to even turn my head to meet his glance.

  “We shall share ourselves with our dark sisters of the wood,” said Margo. “We will unite and become one. We will become an unstoppable force that cannot be contained! All will bow before us and tremble with fear.”

  At this point, the cheering became so loud, it drowned out any slight sound we could make. Careful not to rustle the tapestry, I backed along the wall to the door, opening it just wide enough to escape, and both of us slipped through. Peter eased the door shut with a barely audible click, and we snuck up the stairs, back into the closet.

  I clawed wildly at the clothes hanging in our way, desperate to get out. We had to get to the apothecary; we had to warn my family. We had mere hours before Margo performed the final ritual that would cement her power, return Gwyneth to the world, and cost Tamsin her life.

  “We’ll go to the police,” Peter was saying behind me. “But Sam, I’ve got to tell you—when I took those pictures—”

  I didn’t get to hear what happened when Peter took the pictures because at that moment, we tumbled out of the closet, only to see that we were busted.

  Cameron stood in the center of the room, holding a bottle of wine. He stared at us, slightly open-mouth. We were caught red-handed. Peter was still drenched in sweat from tearing apart the wall, and crawling through the jagged plaster opening had showered my hair in dust.

  To my utter shock, he only laughed.

  “How delightfully kinky,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Margo.”

  With an exaggerated and lascivious wink, he lurched out of the room, chugging his bottle of wine. I heard his footsteps recede down the hall, then creak drunkenly down the stairs.

  I rushed from the room toward my own with Peter on my heels. We locked ourselves in my bedroom. It was hardly the scenario I envisioned, during all my previous imaginings of being locked in a bedroom with Peter. It reminded me more of one of those three wish scenarios, where each one tragically backfires until you use the final one to wish that you’d never made any wishes at all.

  Peter pulled out his phone.

  “I’ve got to show you this,” he said. “These are the pictures I took in that room.” He showed me the screen, rapidly scrolling through them with his thumb. The screen was black on every single one of them.

  I took out my phone, scrolling to the video I took of Margo, Bridget, and Kimmy in the clearing during the music video shoot. A feeling of dread gathered in the pit of my stomach.

  The part toward the end of the video when their faces had shifted to ancient terrifying witch-faces shifted abruptly to black, as if a shadow had passed over the lens in that exact second. It made no sense.

  “What about the recording?” I said frantically. “You said you recorded them, did it work?”

  “I’m looking now.” He fingers flew over the screen as he located the video. He pushed play and turned the volume all the way up. Margo had been shouting at the top of her lungs; the gathered crowd in the secret room yelling and cheering just as loudly. There was nothing but static.

  “I have to tell my family we couldn’t find Tamsin,” I said, frustrated beyond belief. “I have to go, right now.”

  “We should get out of here, anyway,” said Peter. “Eventually, they’re going to wonder why you have no idea what’s going on and haven’t participated in any of this. No one’s going to believe I’m that effective a distraction.”

  I would have, was my thought as I followed Peter down the stairs toward the front door. It was remarkable how attracted to him I was even in a state of fight or flight, which I guess made sense if you took into account the side effect of adrenaline. There was no sound from the first floor, so I assumed they were all safely ensconced behind the wall, celebrating their dark rites of madness.

  Peter dropped me off in front of the apothecary. He said he was going to report his findings to his contact at the police department to see if anything could be done.

  “You should stay with your family,” he told me as I got out of the truck. “At least that way I know you’ll be safe.”

  I agreed, though in my mind, I had already determined that I would go wherever I needed to go in order to get Tamsin back. I ran up the sidewalk and into the shop. It was now dark, the sign turned to Closed, but the door was unlocked and I knew they had left the door open for me.

  I expected to find them in the back room, in the strange room that felt like being suspended in the middle of space, and I was surprised to find them gathered at the front of the shop as if waiting for me.

  “I couldn’t find Tamsin,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I can’t find her anywhere. We’re running out of time. They’re performing ritual the tonight!”

  “We know,” said my grandmother quietly. Minerva looked devastated but determined. My mother looked like her heart was breaking for me, Tamsin, and all of us
.

  “We need you to go somewhere and stay there until this is over,” she said firmly. “We can’t take the risk of Gwyneth getting ahold of you with the kind of power you have.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe what she was saying to me. “But I can help! I have to help, we have to get Tamsin back—”

  “And we will,” interrupted my grandmother. “But in order to do that, we need you out of harm’s way. You have no control over your powers. You have no concept of our world or how it works. We can’t make you into the witch you need to be to fight Gwyneth in a matter of hours. It’s better this way. If you care about Tamsin, you’ll do what we say and stay out of the way.”

  First Peter, now them. Why was everybody so convinced that I was hapless, helpless, and just needed to be protected? It was insulting. Not to mention wrong. I knew I could do things the others couldn’t do. Only I had seen firsthand how powerful the dark coven was and realized how much danger we were in.

  But it was impossible to argue and waste time with Minerva standing there. How could I look her in the eye and argue with her plan for rescuing her daughter, who I’d only met a week ago?

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll stay out of the way. I’ll stay at Peter’s.” I kept my mind as blank as possible, knowing how easily my grandmother could read my intentions. She squinted thoughtfully, watching me. I imagined going back to Peter’s and waiting to find out what happened to them.

  “I’m glad you’re being reasonable about this,” she said.

  “I’ll go right now,” I said. “Can you please at least tell me what you’re doing first, though? So that at least I’m not worried about you, too?”

  Aurora looked like she was about to object, but Minerva had already began to speak. Aurora fell silent.

  “The room behind the curtain is no ordinary room,” she said, her voice weary and hollow. “It’s not unlike the room you told us about in the Dark Horse Inn. But rather than a powerful center of dark magic, it is a powerful center we use to maintain the balance between two sides. We haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

  This time, my mother made a sound as if to protest, then decided against it. Instead, she picked up where Minerva left off. I thought of Gwyneth in the cellar. So they had been lying to me, after all. But about what?

  “Our family serves a specific function in this world,” my mother said. “The powers that we have—clairvoyance, healing, nature—are very much to help the world. So if there is ever a threat, we can combine our powers in order to stop it. It’s happened once before. We triumphed then, with no loss to our lives. We believe we will triumph again.”

  I wanted to ask what had happened before that my mother was so sure, but it was clear that it wasn’t a story that could be easily and quickly surmised. Still, it was reassuring to know that they were more prepared to deal with the forces that threatened them than I thought. I was ashamed that I—who had only just discovered that I had powers at all—thought I knew better than they did, when they’d dealt with this reality for their entire lives.

  “We’ll use the room to astrally project ourselves into the clearing,” my mother continued. “Our powers allow us to use them as fully in astral form as we do corporeally. We will perform a spell in the back room that will bind Margo and whoever she’s enlisted for her dark coven from bringing Gwyneth back or causing any further harm. Since we won’t physically be there, there will be nothing she can do to harm us. Since they don’t know that we’re coming, we’ll have the element of surprise on our hands.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” I asked one last time.

  “Stay put,” said my mother. “And take care of yourself.” She wrapped her arms around me and I buried my face in her shoulder. I had just found her. I tried not to imagine what it would feel like to lose her all over again.

  “Don’t go sneaking out of Peter’s and trying to help,” said my grandmother sternly. “Think of how many more problems it would create rather than solve.”

  “We’ll get her back.” Minerva smiled thinly. “Don’t worry.”

  I felt even worse that Minerva was now reassuring me when it should have been the other way around. I quickly hugged her and Aurora so I could leave before I exhibited any further selfish outbursts.

  “We’ll see you soon,” said my mother. Her voice was gentle and reassuring, but her eyes were filled with sadness, and I knew she was just as worried as I was.

  I rushed out of the shop into the dark night. I looked one way, then the other. I turned and started walking in the direction of Peter’s apartment in case they were watching me through the door. Once I reached the end of the block, I turned onto Main Street and headed in the opposite direction.

  Whatever my family believed about my inability to harness my powers effectively, they hadn’t seen the things I’d done without even trying. I knew for an absolute certainty that no matter what they said, no matter how much greater their wisdom was than mine, I had a force at my disposal more powerful than all of them combined. And if for whatever reason they somehow failed to get Tamsin back and stop Margo, I was the only one who could.

  “Sam! You’re back!” Bridget threw open the front door as I walked up the steps. “Are you finally coming out with us?”

  Margo appeared in the hallway behind me and eyed me with a smirk. “At last, she finally recovers from her male-obsessed brain to make time for her sisters,” she said. If Margo, aside from her affected British accent, had sounded halfway normal when I first met her, that was now a distant memory. It was apparent she’d gone completely around the bend.

  “What have you guys been doing, anyway?” I asked. “Just hanging out in the woods?”

  Margo laughed. “You could say that.”

  “Oh, but it’s so much more than that, Sammy!” Bridget was breathless with excitement. “We sing songs, and chant, and drink wine, and wear robes—”

  “Robes?” I said innocently.

  “It brings a certain gravity to our festivities,” said Margo dismissively. “Don’t worry, we saved one for you.”

  She turned to walk down the hallway, Bridget trotting eagerly after her. In the ballroom, the lights had been extinguished. Dozens of black candles were lit, spanning the length of the ballroom in a long line. Behind them, Ferrari, Tapia, Paulina, and Kimmy stood in a line with their heads bowed, silent. They didn’t look up when we came in.

  “Get behind the candles,” Margo ordered Bridget and me. We obediently took our places at the end of the line. Margo took her place at the head of the line and we stood in silence.

  “What are we waiting for?” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth to Bridget.

  “Quiet,” Kimmy hissed from my other side.

  Soft footsteps padded into the room. I looked up in stark fear. What if it was the deer monster from the woods? I tried to take a step forward as if to flee, but it felt like an invisible wall had formed where the line of candles sat. What was going on?

  It was only Cameron. I remembered what Tamsin had told me about how he was Margo’s familiar, in human form. He wore a black robe. A bundle of blood-red robes were draped over his arm. He held a bundle of what looked like twigs in his other hand. As I watched, he proceeded down the line, handing each of us a robe and a bundle of sticks.

  When he got to me, a wholly benevolent and beatific smile spread across his face. His eyes seemed to issue light and warmth from the center of his core, and for the first time I had doubts about the way I perceived the situation. Surely such a warm and benign being could not be anything bad or in service to any great evil. He was clearly here to do good.

  “I’m glad you’ve decided to join us,” he said, handing me a robe. I pulled it on over my clothes. Cameron lowered his hood, revealing the sticks I recalled him weaving together in the woods the day we looked for the spleenwort. I saw then that they were a crown. It looked like the ones he’d made Margo, Kimmy, and Bridget for the music video.

  He bowed his head, in
dicating that I do the same. Cameron placed a small crown on my head, then lifted the hood of my robe and covered it.

  I knew in that moment I was in over my head.

  41

  Sisters of Darkness

  “Are you ready?” he said, smiling.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  He winked. He turned and joined Margo at the front of the line, and turning toward the door, we exited in a single file line. A low chant began at the front and rippled to the back as we marched down the hallway, through the kitchen and out the back door into the night.

  It took me awhile to make out the words as we made our way to the woods, but gradually I made out the same mumbled phrases repeated, over and over: revenge…our time is now…our time is near…the blood moon and the darkest night…sisters of darkness, our time is at hand…

  I debated whether or not to mumble along, but was afraid the words were a spell of some kind, and by doing so, I might unleash a powerful force.

  We walked through the woods for what felt like hours, crossing small streams and gullys, going up and downhill. Branches tore at the sleeves of my robe and stones tripped me every few feet in the dark. I felt every rock and every tear, but the others seemed sunk into a hypnotized stupor.

  As we walked, I thought of my family: what would they say if they knew what I was doing? I quickly pushed this thought from my brain. If I survived the night, they would probably kill me.

  Instead, I thought about Peter. Had he gotten the cops involved? Even if he had, he had no idea where we were. They might make it as far as the manor, which they would find abandoned. Peter would assume I was with my family. My heart gave a twist when I realized that the moment he dropped me off might be the last time I would ever see him again.

  Just when I thought I could walk no more, the procession came to an abrupt halt. I almost walked into Bridget’s back before I looked up and caught myself just in time.