Sorciére

by J. R. Erickson

  She had foolishly believed that as she came into her power, panic and anxiety would simply disappear. She would blast it away with a geyser or something. Instead, she felt heightened by everything, including anxiety, and the black spots behind her eyes were like moon eclipses.

  When Lydie walked into the bathroom, talking merrily with another young witch, Abby could only stare at them, imagining how insane she looked, but unable to fake it.

  Lydie immediately ran to her, squatting down and pushing her hair back from her face.

  "What happened? What is it, Abby?" The smile drained from Lydie's mouth and Abby felt guilty. The other young witch, dressed as an insect of some sort, looked equally unhinged.

  Abby shook her head and frowned.

  "Have you seen Sebastian, Lydie? I really need to find him."

  "Only earlier when you two were dancing," she said, continuing to look concerned.

  Abby struggled to her feet and smoothed out her dress, avoiding Lydie's puzzled stare.

  "You looked so scared, though. I mean, are you sure there wasn't something else?" Lydie glanced around, studying the high, dark corners in the bathroom. Candlelight only made more sinister the unseen crevices and Abby understood that as much as Lydie loved All Hallow's Eve, it also terrified her.

  When she left the bathroom, Abby felt the first wave of panic wash over her. Ghoulish, masked faces leered at her as she stumbled down the hall. She stared into faces and at the backs of heads, seeking only one, but his familiar blue eyes did not meet hers in return. When she finally found Oliver, her panic was bordering hysteria.

  "Sebastian's missing!"

  Chapter Seven

  Abby sat on the salmon-colored chaise beneath her window and stared numbly at the black storm moving across the water. There were tears, but they were far down, imbedded in the dark places too deep to dig free, so her eyes remained dry while her heart split again and again with no physical release. Sebastian was gone.

  Gone? But what did that even mean? She couldn't seem to reach the bottom of that thought, the place where it ceased to be a boiling stone in her stomach and turned into a facet of the mind--a logical piece of information that she could work with.

  How had they talked her into returning? She had wanted to stay and the witches at Sorciére had more than offered their assistance and their coven, but somehow the witches of Ula rallied around her and, before she could protest, Oliver practically carried her to the mirror and back to the suffocating isolation of Ula. They force-fed her calming tea and brainstormed their strategies as Abby watched in utter shock and disbelief. Faustine would track him from the tower, Oliver and Dafne would go on the hunt, they would contact other covens, but all for what? They had left him there. He could have merely wandered into a dungeon and gotten lost, but Abby knew better than that. Superior witches with powerful skills had searched the castle for him. He had vanished without a trace.

  Now she sat in her empty room and watched the white caps on the lake below. Every watery surge thrust into her like steel pokers jabbing at the soft flesh of her heart. Still she did not cry and when Helena brought her more tea, she did not drink it, but let it sit on the windowsill and grow cold in the approaching twilight.

  She slept in fits, waking again and again to the emptiness of her room, only to remember a much greater emptiness--Sebastian. The clock chimed and she knew that twenty-four hours had passed since she'd last touched him, last seen the candlelight flicker in his blue eyes while he whirled her around the Sorciére castle, looking happier than she had ever seen him.

  "You have to eat something, love," Oliver told her, pushing in her door with his hip. He balanced a tray on a single hand and Abby smelled orange juice that made her stomach turn.

  "Were you a waiter in a previous life?" she asked dryly.

  "In this life actually, one of my many pre-witch talents."

  Abby sighed and leaned back into her pillows. It was nearly six pm and she could already see the sun in its gradual descent. She had not left her room since they had returned early that morning and Oliver had tried twice to coax her down, but each time she refused. This time, he brought the food to her.

  "Come on, spoonful of sugar?" he asked, pointing to a bowl of sugar next to a halved grapefruit.

  Her stomach rumbled a hallow cry, but she ignored it, feeling only a knot where hunger usually lived.

  "I'm genuinely not hungry, Oliver."

  "I know that." He propped the tray on the bed and sat down next to it. "But you still need to eat. You're skin and bones as it is, Abby."

  Not true exactly, though the healthy weight that Abby had gained when her powers initially surfaced had suddenly subsided. Stress was a mighty force and it had rendered her skeletal in hours.

  She picked up a piece of toast and lifted it to her lips, taking a tiny bite. It scraped the inside of her mouth and took several minutes to chew, but she finally swallowed it with scratchy reluctance.

  "There. Happy?" She knew that she sounded bratty, but she didn't care. She felt horrible and wanted to pay it forward to anyone insane enough to enter her space.

  "How could I have left him? How could we have left him?" she asked Oliver, not for the first time. He was the only one who really seemed to agree with her that they should have stayed.

  "He never should have been there," Abby added, shaking her head viciously. "Why did I ask him to go? Why did I convince Elda to conceal him?"

  "Things happen, Abby," he said. "There's a reason for all this. We don't know what it is, but have faith that it will work out."

  She bit her cheeks to refrain from snapping at him and stared out the window instead.

  He sighed and took a bite of the croissant on the tray, smiling apologetically as he chewed.

  "No, eat it. I can't." She rubbed her hands on the side of her head as though it might relieve some of the pressure building there.

  "Elda and Faustine are taking action. I know it feels like they're not right now, but they actually are."

  "Why can't I act? What's the point of being a witch in a coven if I'm shoved aside when the person that I love is in danger? Am I just supposed to swallow this?"

  "Hey." He set the tray on her bed and took a seat beside her, placing a hand in hers and gently rubbing her fingers. "I get it. I know that you're ready to explode right now, but you can only help Sebastian if you're calm. Irrational stuff will just put you in danger. You know that it's true."

  She knew that he referred to her frantic middle-of-the-night rescue attempt, little more than six weeks before, a choice that sent her into the lair of an evil witch, at the bidding of the ghost Devin, all in an attempt to save her family who, it turned out, were not even in danger. He was right, but she could only get behind that on a logical level. Her heart, her soul and her body told her to move, to get off the couch, out of the castle and back to Sorciére while the last of Sebastian's trace still remained.

  "Tell me this," she demanded, jerking her hand from Oliver's and turning to face him. "How would he even get back here? How?"

  "You heard what Elda said. She enchanted the charm to send him here, to bring him back to the castle."

  Abby shook her head in disbelief.

  "She said that after he was gone. She never told us that before the party. I thought he would simply be outside the castle, in the city or something."

  Oliver held up his hands in surrender.

  "That was my impression also, but she has no reason to change her story. They would never leave Sebastian. Abby, we searched the grounds outside the castle. He wasn't there."

  It was true, they had searched. After the Ball ended and Sorciére had cleared, they searched every inch of the castle and the grounds surrounding it. Faustine and Elda rallied the witches who they'd known for centuries, who they could trust with their secret, and together they hunted.

  They did not merely look for him, though. Powerful witches could see with much more than their eyes. They consulted tools of divination. They had scra
ped beneath Abby's fingernails and removed things from her dress, but did not find enough of Sebastian to work with. Faustine had returned to Ula through the two-way mirror and retrieved articles of Sebastian's clothing, his hairbrush and pair of his sunglasses. In a room that felt oddly like a bubble, the witch Demetrius lit five cauldrons. In each, he dropped an article that belonged to Sebastian. Every cauldron revealed images of Sebastian at the Ball and then only darkness. Both the Ula and Sorciére witches were dumbfounded.

  "I just feel trapped here. They insisted that I come back and now I'm sitting here biting my fingernails, which just grow back to spite me." She held up her fingernails, still long, but jagged in the spots that she'd just bitten.

  As Abby watched the incoming storm slowly rolling toward them, she thought back to the previous night.

  "We'll find him," Oliver had reassured her, for the seemingly hundredth time. They stalked the castle together, most of their costumes pulled off and left in a heap on one of the many hallway floors. She'd been peeling off layers for hours since the first inkling deep in her belly that something terrible had happened. She wore only the black dress that acted as a sheath beneath the dazzling Melusine costume. When she glanced down, she realized that it looked like a dress for mourning.

  At first, she had merely believed that Claire's warning had struck a chord and the ominous tone continued to reverberate through her, but after nearly an hour looking in ballrooms and banquet halls, on verandas and in sitting areas, she started to recognize that her fear was for Sebastian. She could not feel him. Even when they fought and he grew very distant from her, she always sensed his presence. Now, as she combed the castle painstakingly, the emptiness chilled her to the core. Oliver visited bathrooms and when that too turned up no trace, they tracked down the witches of Ula and each individually began their own search. Twice they had reconvened, but not a fragment of him remained. They could not even find a witch who had seen him in the previous hours.

  Abby and Oliver took the steps two a time, climbing one of the castle's several wings. The halls were dark, not meant for party goers, but most of the guests had departed and those that remained belonged to Sorciére and many of those witches too had begun to look for Sebastian. Only a few witches close to Elda and Faustine knew that they searched for a human. Elda believed it unwise to let the secret out to everyone.

  Oliver waved his hand and a tall mahogany door, previously locked, popped open. Beyond, lay only a dark room stuffed with paintings and antiques. If Sebastian hid in that space, they'd never find him amid the towers of art and statuary. They encountered Helena in the next room, frantically ripping blankets and pillows from a linen closet in search of him. When she turned to them, she looked wild, but immediately pretended to be unruffled when her eyes fell upon Abby.

  "You can't feel him either?" Abby asked, though she already knew the answer.

  The night went on that way. Abby watched Demetrius with the cauldrons. Then she sat in one of the All Hallow's tents as Helena and then Bridget consulted a crystal ball. Max astral-travelled throughout Soricere and then back to Ula. Faustine used Sorciére's Crystal Tower to seek Sebastian with his mind.

  Abby stood on the craggy rocks outside of Sorciére for an hour. She stared into the raging river and wondered if Sebastian had been pulled to a watery grave.

  At daybreak, Elda insisted that they meet in the kitchen for coffee and regrouping. By then, the alarm was unmistakable and the best efforts of the empaths to calm the group failed. Faustine announced that they must leave Sorciére and return to Ula.

  "Why?" Abby demanded, almost too exhausted to stand, but still ready to fight.

  Galla, a Sorciére elder answered.

  "Because Sebastian is not in our castle and, if he did somehow get displaced, Elda bewitched him back to Ula."

  Abby started to argue, but Elda placed a hand on her arm.

  "It's true, Abby. We must return."

  When she refused, they forced her to drink a strong tea that Galla had prepared until she became too sleepy to stand. She vaguely remembered Oliver carrying her through the mirror.

  ****

  Dafne moved quickly. She stole into the night at Ula and climbed to the furthest cliff from the castle. The slick rock wall threatened to send her into the icy lake as she carefully threaded her way down the cliff. She slipped into a tiny crevice that offered only enough space for her to lie fully on the earthen ground. She opened her bag, grasping the items tight in her hands, and then she closed her eyes, releasing her astral body.

  Indra waited in the caves of the ancients, her purple hair tucked behind her eyes. Her face betrayed none of the fear that Dafne tasted bitterly at the back of her throat. Both Indra and Dafne had participated in the search for Sebastian that morning. In truth, they bumbled the search and misled the other witches at every opportunity. Dafne knew that she had set events in motion that would alter all of their destinies.

  Indra gave Dafne a single nod of affirmation and moved forward. She stopped at the center tunnel. They could not enter the tunnel if it had nothing to tell them, but Indra had been studying The Pool of Truth for years and she had uncovered a spell that allowed them through. With her hands she began to draw designs in the stale energy before her. Like carefully aligning a Rubik's cube, she undid the charms that prevented their entrance. Dafne watched her in awe, knowing that each action took them deeper into the betrayal of their covens.

  They moved together down the center tunnel, their shadowless astral bodies gliding effortlessly, but Dafne could not deny the trepidation that held her chest in its vice-like grip. It was not thought, for she had turned that off weeks ago when she had embarked on this tumultuous path. However, her instincts, which she had relied on all her life, told her to turn back. She ignored them and continued.

  They moved into the silvery light of the cave where water splashed down from the black sky above. The Pool of Truth shone in magnificent waves of starlight and moonlight--not perfectly calm, but slightly turbulent as if it sensed their treachery.

  Indra stepped in first and Dafne followed. They stood ankle-deep and linked their arms, both of them tilting back, chests lifting as they began to chant. As their mouths moved in unison, the water swirled and crashed, becoming a stormy sea that bucked around them. Dafne could feel its energy, but dared not look into its depths. Legend told that spells cast against The Pool of Truth brought grave consequences to their creator. Witches knew that some magical spaces and objects were gifts of the divine and to manipulate them was to break sacred law.

  "But it's for the greater good," Indra had insisted and Dafne had agreed, of course she had. What witch wouldn't leap to such measures if it meant avoiding the annihilation of her coven and more? Who wouldn't topple the evil before it took hold?

  Their voices rose and the sky turned orange and then red until balls of fire rained into the cave and filled the water with bright, putrid light. It burned Dafne's eyes and, though her physical body was not there, she felt her skin begin to blister and cry out. Indra cried as if she too burned and their astral bodies bled together in the firelight.

  Indra moved into her power now and water seethed up, forming a dozen cyclones filled with Dafne's fire. The water and fire spun until it broke away from the lagoon and formed a much larger orb above them. Indra looked up into the sphere, her green eyes reflecting the electric colors.

  Dafne kneeled on the ground and conjured the clothes that she had clutched in her arms when moving into her astral body. Sebastian's jeans, worn in the knees, a gray Bob Marley t-shirt and even his underpants, blue boxer briefs, appeared before her on the ground. She breathed invisible fire into the clothes and slowly his body emerged. It was not Sebastian, merely an image of him imbued with his essence. The body rose to its feet and then off the ground, pulled by the velocity of the spinning energy above it.

  The body lifted and then merged with the pulsing fire and water. Dafne watched the sphere consume the body and then, with a deafening crash, the
orb slammed back into the Pool of Truth and sunk to the depths.

  ****

  Candles flickered in the nearly black room. Elda, Faustine, Helena, Max and Bridget stood together in the Magic Circle chanting in unison. Their voices barely registered above a whisper and they had begun to sway gently from side to side. They wore their old cloaks which had grown faded and dusty from years without use. In the center of the circle, the X began to glow. The soft white light grew brighter as they focused their attention upon it, until the entire room was awash. They each closed their eyes, saving themselves from the blinding and mesmerizing light.

  "I call upon the energies of the Universe, the spirits of the ancestors," Faustine bellowed. His voice echoed off the concave walls and reverberated around them.

  They repeated his words. They called upon the Watch Towers of the north, south, east and west. They called upon their elements, their guides and the white light that infused all things. Their voices merged and flowed like an ellipsis sounding their cries into eternity. Helena began to cry and her tears made the X glow brighter still.

  With invisible fingers, Faustine reached into their sphere of power. He searched for the thread, the single radiant filament that would cast out the darkness that had settled upon Ula. A single thread that might show them the path to Sebastian, whose lost soul haunted all of their waking and sleeping moments. Each witch felt Faustine as he probed the sphere of light and retreated, empty, again and again.

  Their energies began to fade. They could not conjure the space for much longer. Max dropped to one knee, his mouth slackening as he tried to continue chanting. Bridget squeezed his hand, but she too barely held on. Her body grew hunched and her head lolled from side to side.

  Faustine's search became more desperate and erratic, which weakened their circle and dispersed the energy further and further out, so that the concentrated light began to flicker off the walls and bounce away from them.