That night they left the boxes in the car and, world weary, took the stairs to Rod's loft. They slept side-by-side in Sydney and Rod's bed, their breath lulling the other to sleep as the comfort of their two bodies near to one another made the long night bearable once more.
****
"Where are you sneaking off to?" Isabelle asked Sebastian , handing him a ceramic to-go mug filled with piping hot tea. "I added honey."
Sebastian had stayed with Isabelle for nearly two weeks. Every day she catered to him and his feelings of desperation grew. Strangely, he sensed that Isabelle was perfectly content to let him live with her, identity-less, forever.
"I'm just going to walk. I'm starting to feel like something's going to come back," Sebastian told her.
"That's great," she said, but her smile looked sad.
He took a sip of his tea and winced as it burned his tongue.
"Thank you again for everything," he told her before he slipped out the door and ambled down the street. For reasons that he did not understand, he wove a strange pattern each time he returned to Patty's store. He doubled back twice and cut through a deli. No matter how many diversions he took before he reached her, he still felt convinced that someone followed him.
Once inside, he closed the door securely behind him and watched through the window for several seconds.
"Got the paranoia on you again today, stranger?" Patty asked, sashaying up to him in a glittery tangerine-colored dress. White tufts of chiffon beneath the skirt combined with knee-high white cowboy boots made the outfit seem more fitting for a five year old whose mother let her pick out her own outfit.
"I like it," he lied, knowing that Patty knew otherwise, but appreciated his compliments just the same.
"Well, I wish I had some good news for you," she told him, walking back to her counter. "But mum's the word on any American disappearances. I've been on the Google for three days and unless you're a teenage girl from Sacramento, I've got nothing."
He moved a pile of clothes from one of her antique chairs and took a seat.
"I'm not surprised," he complained. "It feels weirder than that. Maybe I was a spy or an assassin?" He looked at her hopefully.
She stood on a step-ladder and then perched on the edge of her counter, her boots dangling childlike two feet from the floor.
"Surfer, I'm telling you. You want my opinion? You caught the wave of your life and it washed you all the way to France. I bet you lived in one of those little Winnebagos on the beach and no one even realizes that you're missing yet."
"Ha, yeah," he chuckled, and flipped absently through one of her women's catalogues. "If that's the case, I wish my spaced-out girlfriend would get sick of making her own eggs and come find me."
He glanced down and an advertisement shocked him to silence. The photo depicted a woman in a long silver dress running up a twisted stairway to a medieval castle beyond. In the prison of his mind, a door swung open and, for an instant, he saw a gothic castle towering over a brilliant lagoon. He tried to follow the image, but nothing else came to him.
Patty scooted closer and glanced at the page.
"You just remembered something?"
He nodded and touched the photo. In his memory, he sought a face or a name, but nothing else developed.
"Maybe you're a Prince," Patty teased.
He stood and paced away from her. A terrible fear that he would never remember anything started to wash over him.
Patty sensed his distress and hopped from the counter. She walked to him and, standing on tiptoes, placed her hands on his shoulders.
"I have someone that I want you to meet," she told him.
****
The next day, Abby showed Oliver the room beneath the loft and together they pawed through boxes of newspaper clippings, journal entries and photos.
"Wow," Oliver said, taking a break and stretching his neck from side to side. "There's too much." He held up his hands in surrender.
"I know," Abby agreed. "I felt the same way when I first came down here. I don't even know where to begin with deciphering all of this. And there's more..."
She crawled out of the space and returned with a manila envelope. She opened it and handed him the single sheet of paper inside.
He studied it, at first not seeing, and then a look of surprise took over his features.
"Dafne? What is this?"
Abby pointed to the figure with the wild hair.
"That is Aubrey Blake and this picture was taken a hundred years ago..."
Oliver slowly shook his head from side to side.
"But Dafne never lived in Trager City. Right? I mean, she told me she came from somewhere out east and she couldn't possibly have known Devin's aunt." But he lifted the picture closer to his face, his concern growing.
"I don't know what it means either, but I found this picture right after Devin died. Dafne knew Devin's aunt, Oliver. I don't know why she didn't tell anyone, but that is her..."
"I need to get outside, it's getting hard to breathe in here," Oliver said, pulling at the collar of his shirt.
Abby agreed and they left the apartment, driving her little car out of the city to an old dune trail that Abby remembered from childhood.
"I haven't been out here in years," she told him as they wound through the woods, walking a path that only existed in her memory.
When she was a child, Sydney took her exploring and they found secret forests and beaches tucked all over the Trager Peninsula. Sometimes Sydney had already staked them out and other times they just walked for hours until they found something worthy of their hike. Abby still owned a single pearl earring from one of their expeditions. It sat in a jewelry box in her childhood bedroom.
"Trager," Oliver said, scanning the horizon as they reached the top of a small bluff. What's the pull? You know what I mean? There's something here, I can feel it, but what? And now this thing with Dafne? Is it possible she just passed through here and didn't even remember it?"
"Dafne doesn't seem like the forgetful type," Abby told him.
He nodded, reluctantly, but knew she spoke the truth. Dafne had been keeping secrets for a very long time.
Abby pointed towards an opening in the dune grass. Lake Michigan lay beyond and, as they started down the slope toward the water, Abby began to feel lighter, even buoyant
Oliver looked at her sideways.
"Well, I see what all this water does for you..."
She smiled and a shiver of pleasure ran through her at the intensity of the lake's energy.
"I understand what you're saying," she murmured. "I've always felt connected to this space. When I left Lansing, I didn't think about a single other spot on earth. Trager was the only refuge. It was almost like I didn't even make the decision."
"And that's what happens," he told her. "One day you're waking up every morning and punching the clock, kissing your girlfriend goodbye like you mean it, and the next day you're driving like a fiend toward some destination that suddenly feels more real than every person and experience of the previous seventeen years of your life."
"Did you have a girlfriend?" Abby asked. "Before?"
Oliver chuckled and ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair. Color appeared high on his checks, but only for an instant and then it washed away as if he willed it so.
"Jamie," he said smiling. "Jamie with the sleepiest brown eyes you've ever seen and this ridiculous hair like silk almost down to her waist. I used to brush it and it made me..."
"So in love?" Abby asked, losing herself for a moment.
"So horny is more like it."
They both started laughing and then the shoreline met their feet and a peaceful lull spread over them. The lake undulated in ripples of green and blue. The gray sky made the sandbars and drop-offs more visible and Abby recalled how it felt to look upon the lake as a child. Standing in that exact same spot with Sydney close at her side, she felt that all of the secrets of the universe lay in that sometimes tranquil, sometimes furious,
water.
Oliver took her hand and squeezed .
****
Love of another is beautiful, but it is not wholly pure. It is dirtied with the mind, with possession, desire, fear and attachment. It is the darkness in that light that makes it the perfect portal for evil to enter. It is so easy to take the enormity of that emotion and feed the shadow. The shadow grows and grows until it swallows the light and the love disappears all together.
Dafne had never spoken of her love affair with Tobias to Elda or Faustine. They did not probe--it was not their way--and she hid her past beneath an impenetrable shield of thought. Only Oliver had ever brought her to the edge of revealing her heart-wrenching story, but then Abby had arrived and with her, Sebastian, and the past had flooded back with excruciating clarity.
Dafne walked the cliff edge, the castle rising behind her like the ominous all-knowing eye in the sky. She felt Faustine's curious gaze from his tower, but she did not look back. She braced her face into the cold November wind and allowed her thoughts to flow freely. Faustine could not read her. She had cut herself away from his searching mind, but allowed simple thoughts to float at the periphery to distract him. More deeply, she considered Sebastian.
Indra had voiced concerns that the spells had failed and his memory had begun to return. Nothing concrete had arrived, but Isabelle claimed that he acted strangely, disappeared for hours at a time and had become rather guarded with her. Dafne did not question her own abilities, but she did question Sebastian's natural power. Both Elda and Faustine had alluded to an unnatural strength in Sebastian, comments that had only driven Dafne deeper into her belief that he was destined to be the next to rise in the Vepar Clan.
He could not return. Her deception of the coven was unforgivable, and placing Sebastian dead in the Pool of Truth...well she preferred not to think what might transpire if her coven knew.
She thought then of the Lourdes of Warning, exiled to her underground prison, tethered by an ancient spell of darkness and her own delirium. None of the others knew of her relationship with the Lourdes. Her web, now spun, could not be disentangled, only annihilated and what destruction would befall all of them if that occurred?
Chapter Twenty
August 1908: After the Fire
Dafne wandered the beach like a soul trapped between this world and the next. She hadn't eaten in days. Her already thin body had grown gaunt and sunken. Her eyes looked out from two gray holes and the bottom of her tattered dress was still black with soot from the fire that stole the life of her best friend, all of her friends. She felt less than utterly alone, she felt dead, as if someone had sliced her down the middle and plucked her heart out, but replaced it with some dead thing that kept her body moving, but nothing else. The waves crashed or they lulled, the tide surged and retracted. Her bare feet crunched over shells and seaweed and dead fish and she walked on, oblivious to the blood and the soreness and the infections beginning to cause the fever that made sweat pop along her hairline.
The sun rose and it fell and if she passed other beings in the land of the living, she did not see them or hear them or notice how they took a wide berth to the sickly girl at the water's edge. Her dark hair grew tangled and sand-filled in the wind.
When Faustine and Elda found her, the walking had ended. She lay nearly dead in the tall dune grass so that if Faustine had not connected with her telepathically, they might never have discovered her there on the beach. She had no recollection of her saviors when she woke four days later in the healing room at Ula, swathed in sheer gauze and breathing the scent of some strange oil burning at her bedside. Elda had barely left her and she sat now, a book balanced on her knees and her eyes watching the young woman with interest and hope.
Dafne blinked and, when she remembered, a long tremble rolled through her body and she started to gag and to cry. She flung herself off the bed and she clawed at the stone floor and wailed as Elda wrapped strong arms around her and cooed in her ear as if she were only a baby. When the crying finally ended, Dafne stared into the deep well of her pain and her past and saw a heavy iron lid swing down upon it, sealing it off as if it never existed at all. As Elda helped her back into the bed, a cool numbness fell over her. Deep in the pit of her belly, a tiny life shifted, but she shut her heart to it and fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lydie wrapped her wool blanket more tightly around her shoulders and climbed the cold sand. At the dune ridge, she glanced back at the castle in the distance, hoping that no one watched her. Even if the other witches saw her, they would merely think that she was napping, though, they would likely find it strange that she napped outside on a cold November afternoon. She settled onto the sand, snuggling deeper into her blanket as the cold wind whipped across the water.
She closed her eyes and waited.
She woke again at another sand dune and began to drift down towards her childhood home. Suddenly the world whipped passed her in a blur. A thousand trees sped by and she found herself in an unfamiliar forest. Bright green ferns tittered on the ground beneath her. She heard voices and moved toward the sound. A woman's scratchy whispers pricked at some sensitive piece of her and she paused, scared. For a second, she wanted to flee back to her physical body, but a need to know urged her forward.
In the distance, a bloom of bright red stood in stark contrast to the greens and browns of the forest. A red, sinister-looking weeping willow rose up from the earth with a cascade of scarlet branches reaching toward the ground.
Lydie saw Dafne at the edge of the willow. Beneath her, stretched along a mossy red floor, Lydie noticed a woman. She moved closer, knowing that they could not see her in her astral form, but terrified still. Flesh hung form the woman's face and she propped her torso high on her hands like a Sphynx. Lydie wanted to look away, but could not seem to rip her gaze from the woman-creature's bent body. The bones along her spine jutted out through a soiled-looking pink dress. Her honey colored hair, out of place on her skeletal form, was pushed over one shoulder.
"I fear that my spells have been unsuccessful. I have removed his memory, but it seems to be coming back. Indra and I placed him in the Pool of Truth, but..." Dafne's voice trembled as she spoke. Though she gazed at the woman, her eyes darted into the forest as if she could only take the sight in small doses.
"Blach." The creature held up a gnarled hand and coughed twice before continuing.
Her gravelly voice crawled through Lydie's brain and she fought the urge to scream. The voice did not belong to a woman, but something ancient and terrifying. "Fools," she continued. "Such little fools you were a hundred years ago and you are even now. That's what happens to witches in covens, you know?"
The woman turned slightly and Lydie glimpsed more of her face. She clenched her eyes shut against the vision. The ghastly face of a corpse sat upon the woman's slender neck. Her blackened lips curled back into the cavity of her mouth and, when she spoke, the hole opened to reveal a yawning emptiness.
"You get weak, turn to mush." She shifted, her body pitching forward, and grabbed a handful of the slimy red moss that jelled between her fingers. "You don't defend evil from your stone palace, little witch. You let it in the front door." She began to cackle and the sound reverberated through the forest.
"Drink Lourdes, you're time is short," Dafne told the woman, shrinking away. She looked as revolted as Lydie felt, but seemed to be trying to hide it.
"Scared of the truth, are you?" the woman screeched. "Scared of this old dead face? What do you think you look like under all that magic? With that black soul eating you away?" She laughed again and then lurched to her feet.
The woman-creature plucked a bottle from Dafne's hand and held it to her lips, drinking thirstily, her dark tongue lashing out at the mouth of the bottle like a lizard. The woman's face began to transform.
As Lydie watched, the creature's face melted and reformed. The sagging skin grew pink and luminous. Full, sensual lips replaced her thin, wrinkled mouth. Her entire body shuddered and
shifted until she became painfully beautiful. Lydie found the beautiful woman almost as impossible to look at as the creature.
The witch, now stunning, cocked her head to the side and turned, her eyes roving over the spot where Lydie stood.
'She can see me,' Lydie thought with horror.
But the woman said nothing.
"I need your help, Lourdes. I know that you don't want this anymore than I do. This curse will destroy us all. Their numbers here are already weakening us. Have you yourself not found your strength diminishing?"
"It is not the Vepars you should fear," the woman told Dafne, smiling maliciously. "It's Kanti."
Lydie saw confusion cross Dafne's face and she too wondered - Who or what was Kanti.
She heard the question begin on Dafne's lips, but already the scene began to fade and she felt her astral form called back to Ula.
****
Sebastian had been surprised when the man sitting in the chair opposite him, reached across the table and plucked a cigarette from his pack, lit it and casually leaned back in his seat.
"Do I know you?" Sebastian asked hopefully, not minding the man's strange behavior if it meant a clue to his identity.
"Yes, and I you," the man told him, his unnerving dark eyes settled on Sebastian's. He rested his oddly short arms on the table before him, clasping his long skeletal fingers together.
The hair on the back of Sebastian's neck stood on end and he shifted in his seat, suddenly itching to be somewhere else.
The man simply watched him, a curious smirk playing across his amused face.
"So you do not remember me?" the man asked, taking a drag on his cigarette and releasing it through his nose.
"He looks like a devil," Sebastian thought, and then chased the image away, unwilling to let go of any opportunity to find answers.
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