The Secret of the Sacred Four

by E J Elwin

  “I’m sure you’ll get the hang of activating it without fear,” said Hortensia. “But isn’t that good enough for now? It’ll keep you alive.”

  “That’s true,” said Lizzie, looking worried again. “No short supply of fear here.”

  “Arthur, how about yours?” asked Sylvie.

  I looked down at my hands, which had burned bright with yellow orange flames the night before. I willed them to ignite, furrowing my brow the way Lizzie had, but nothing happened.

  “Bah!” shouted Sylvie.

  I jumped, but no flames appeared on my hands. “Not a fear response, I guess,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Sylvie. “Maybe think of the Brotherhood? What do they call their leader?”

  “The Patriarch,” I said in a low voice.

  My right hand burst into flames, bright yellow and orange with glints of red like before. The girls jumped in surprise, and I raised my hand to examine the fire, which caused me not even a tiny bit of pain but exuded a good amount of heat.

  “Cool,” said Sylvie in an awed voice, the flames reflected in her hazel eyes.

  “It’s a little more colorful than regular fire, isn’t it?” asked Lizzie, scrutinizing the flames. “Prettier. Is that just me?”

  “I see it too,” said Hortensia. “It’s… glitterier. It is magical fire, after all.”

  I understood what they meant. At first glance, it looked like I had just taken an ordinary lighter and lit my hand up, but after a closer look, I could see the colorful dimensions in the fire, the way it sparkled ever so subtly, shimmering in a way I had never seen from any regular fire.

  I pointed my hand at the fireplace, which was gray with ash, and imagined the Patriarch’s face, his bulging insane eyes and rough features that looked like they were carved out of wood. There was a rush of heat in my veins, through my forearm and out to my fingertips, and the yellow orange flames reared up on my hand, then shot onto the ashy firewood. A second later, the grate was alive with a crackling fire, spitting flickers of red up into the chimney.

  “Nice!” said Sylvie.

  The flames on my right hand were still burning exactly as they had been before shooting out at the fireplace. A little shake of my hand and they vanished.

  “That’s going to be the Brotherhood,” said Hortensia, looking into the roaring fireplace.

  “Damn right it is,” said Sylvie. “Alright, let’s go eat before I drop.”

  We walked into the kitchen, and it struck me that only twenty-four hours ago, I had done it alone, without any knowledge of the Sacred Four or who I really was, or what had happened to Connor. The girls looked around at the vine-laced cabinets with fascination, and I saw that the kitchen table where Harriet, Jessica, and I had talked, was empty. The luscious aroma of food was so heavy I could almost taste the dishes in the air.

  There was a knock on the wide glass door that led out onto the balcony, and we turned to see Jessica, Harriet, and Jasper sitting out there around a long wooden table. All three of them looked extremely cheerful as they beckoned us over.

  “There you four are,” said Jessica, as the girls and I stepped out onto the balcony. The smell of food was joined by the salty wet smell of the ocean.

  “We were just having a little power test,” said Sylvie.

  “Ooh, how exciting!” said Harriet.

  “Behold!” shouted Jasper theatrically, as we took our seats. “The Sacred Breakfast!”

  “It certainly looks sacred,” said Sylvie.

  I looked around at the table and spotted the toast and fried sausages I had smelled from upstairs. There were also platters of eggs and bacon, fluffy yellow omelets, stacks of pancakes and gooey french toast, peppery fried potatoes, and bowls of fruit. Two glass pitchers of orange juice sat in the center of the table along with seven steaming mugs of coffee. It resembled a holiday feast more than a breakfast spread, and was easily the grandest one I’d ever sat down to.

  “We wanted to do something special for your first meal together,” said Jessica. “Even Jasper helped, and he hates cooking.”

  “Well, it looks amazing, thank you,” said Lizzie, and Sylvie, Hortensia, and I echoed her.

  We loaded our plates with a bit of everything and I noticed Harriet watching me with satisfaction, no doubt glad she didn’t have to persuade me to eat again.

  “Try the sausages, Arthur,” said Jessica. “Jasper made them.”

  “Behold the Sacred Sausage!” said Jasper, passing me the platter.

  “You can stop that any time,” said Jessica, though she looked highly amused.

  A few minutes went by in which only the sound of knives and forks clinking against china were heard, accompanied by the ever-present sound of the ocean’s waves, like backup vocalists in a band who were always there, singing softly, whether you noticed them or not.

  After a gulp of orange juice, Hortensia spoke. “I’m curious. Why the Pacific Northwest? Why us, in Oregon? Ursula Urry was English, right? Why are we the Sacred Four and not some English kids?”

  “Oh, I think geography has very little bearing on worthiness,” said Harriet. “Remember, it wasn’t a council of people who chose you, or even Ursula herself— it was the magic that did. There could be a million reasons why it was you four and not some kids in, say, Brazil or Australia. Maybe Salem here in the States being the last gasp of the great witch hunts had something to do with it. The magic, being born from the hunts in Europe, would likely be drawn to the new similar energy.”

  “Huh,” said Hortensia, pensively nibbling on a piece of bacon.

  “My guess is that it’s also the reason why the Sacred Four has a boy in it,” said Harriet.

  I looked up at her, my mouth full of pancakes.

  “Most of those killed in the Burning Times and in Salem were non-witch women,” she said, “but there were men too, a small minority. And now you, Arthur, are the minority in the Sacred Four.”

  “Lovely,” I said. Hortensia and Sylvie laughed, and I caught their gazes and grinned.

  “So this Bonding Ceremony,” said Lizzie, “how does it work?”

  “It’s very simple,” said Jessica. “All you need is your coven, a cauldron, some nature, and the midnight hour. Also, a little blood and some Silver Solvent.”

  “Blood?” asked Lizzie nervously.

  “Just a few drops,” said Jessica. “Blood is common currency in a lot of spells. It represents you, and therefore is an essential magical ingredient. You can’t really do a Bonding Ceremony without it.”

  “What’s Silver Solvent?” asked Sylvie.

  “It’s a magical solution of liquid silver,” said Jessica. “Silver is hugely important to witches. We have a special link to it. It’s a powerful component in a lot of potions and spells, and also has protective properties. You’ll notice your Cloaking Crystal necklaces are silver. Ceremonial knives or tools of any kind are very often made of silver or include it in some way.”

  I flashed back to Harriet’s silver knife, gleaming beneath the moon in Wineville Cemetery, and remembered the realization I’d had in the Purple Haze about my lack of a Cloaking Crystal during the resurrection spell. I would have to find a moment to talk to Harriet about it alone. If I was right about what happened, I wasn’t keen on the girls hearing that information just before our battle with the Brotherhood. It couldn’t be good for morale.

  “Similar to silver,” Jessica continued, “diamonds and other precious stones like sapphires and emeralds have powerful magical properties. Jasper and I are very fortunate to have quite a few of them, which belonged to our mom.”

  Sylvie whistled. “What was your mom, like, a rockstar?”

  “Close,” said Jessica. “Movie star.”

  “No way!” said Sylvie. “You said your last name was Appleby? Not… Lana Appleby?” Jessica and Jasper smiled. They must have enjoyed hearing that their mom, who they lost too early, still caused excitement and awe even long after her death. “Your mom was Lana Appleby?” asked Sylvie, in the exact s
ame tone that I had the day before. “That is so cool! I love The Impossible Riddle!”

  “Me too!” said Hortensia.

  “I love Voices We Hear,” said Lizzie brightly.

  “Oh, if only she could see the Sacred Four raving about her movies,” said Jessica in a dreamy voice. “She believed in Ursula’s prophecy, and she loved being a witch. She also loved silver and jewels. It was a bonus for her that they weren’t just beautiful but had magical power as well. I used to call her the Queen of the Silver Screen when I was little.”

  Jessica explained that her mother and Harriet had been childhood friends growing up in the Bay Area of California. After high school, Lana went south to Hollywood to become an actress while Harriet went north to Oregon to go to college. They had kept in touch, even as Lana traveled around the world, and eventually she had decided to buy the property in Seaside as a home base to raise her children. Harriet had known Jessica and Jasper their whole lives.

  “Anyway,” said Jessica, “I could go on about her for days, but we should get to the details of the Bonding Ceremony and the plan for tonight.”

  Sylvie, Lizzie, Hortensia, and I put down our forks and leaned in to hear the details of the coming night’s battle. Jessica, Jasper, and Harriet smiled at each other conspiratorially, already so sure of what the plan would look like…

  **

  We rose from the table less than hour later, and my head was buzzing with new information. Among other things, I learned that Persuasion Powder, while extremely powerful and easy to use, was dangerous and ineffective if used in overly large quantities, or if used repeatedly on the same person within a short amount of time. It was derived from real emeralds, which was what gave it its shimmery green color, and which made it very expensive and difficult for the average witch to produce.

  I learned that witches with the gift of Sight, like Jasper, could only see about one or two days into the future on average, and that visions of the future were hard to command. Most things that witches with Sight could see easily were things that were currently happening in someone’s life or things that had happened in their past, which was done most directly by touching the person in question whose present or past they wanted to see. It was part of what had made Ursula so extraordinary. She had been able to see many things in the future, much further in advance than one or two days, and in stunning detail. Ultimately, she had made the biggest and, by extension, the most hard to believe prophecy of her life that morning of her fifty-fourth birthday when she jumped out of bed and introduced the idea of the Sacred Four to the world.

  Jessica led us back inside and offered to give us the full tour of the house, to which the girls excitedly agreed. I was itching to talk to Harriet but decided it could wait, before following Jessica and the girls upstairs to the second floor.

  “Now, this floor is mostly bedrooms,” said Jessica, as we walked past the many doors we’d left ajar, “so nothing too interesting down here…”

  “They’re really beautiful rooms,” offered Lizzie.

  “Thank you, sweetie,” said Jessica. We followed her to the third floor, the only one we hadn’t explored yet, its long hallway lined with closed doors and a Persian rug like the one below. “That’s Jasper’s bedroom,” she said, as we passed the first door on the right, left ajar.

  I caught a glimpse of a four-poster bed with a dark blue bedspread, a big wooden box at the foot of the bed that looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, and the glistening silver pieces of what I assumed to be motorcycle parts hanging on the walls, next to a large poster of a black and blue Harley Davidson that looked like it could have been the same one that was out in the garage. There was also a rusty black cauldron just like Harriet’s, which looked so at odds next to all the motorcycle paraphernalia.

  Jessica stopped in front of the room next to Jasper’s. “There are ten rooms on this floor,” she said. “This one, room number two, is what we call the Mom Museum…”

  She opened the door and led us inside. It was like walking into the tastefully decorated gift shop of a museum, except everything was about one person. The walls were covered with pictures of Lana Appleby, including several framed full-sized posters of the movies she had starred in. I spotted the one for The Impossible Riddle, which featured Lana front and center in the dramatic painted style of 1960s movie posters. Her blonde hair fell in waves around her shoulders like Jessica’s did, and she wore an intense look that suggested she was working out a complex problem. The dark outline of a man in a suit and fedora hat loomed behind her. “A Heart-Pounding Thrill!” read the tagline beneath the title.

  I looked around at the many other photos, which were a mix of professional shots from her career as an actress and ones that were clearly private, taken on vacations aboard boats or on beaches. In several of them, I recognized the very house we were in, and then one in particular caught my eye. Lana stood outside in front of the house, hugging a little girl with blonde pigtails of about six years old who was unmistakably Jessica. The six-year-old Jessica looked joyfully unkempt, her nose spotted with dirt, and she held a large bouquet of flowers in her little arms, wearing a proud smile that showed two missing front teeth. The flowers were of all different kinds and colors, and some of them had been laced through both Jessica and Lana’s hair. In the background, I saw that the giant trees covering the entrance to the house, the ones that had made me feel like I’d walked into a rainforest, weren’t there yet.

  “That was the first time I’d ever made flowers blossom on command,” said Jessica, watching me examine the photo. “Mom was so proud. She took me right out for ice cream.”

  “She was just gorgeous,” sighed Lizzie, looking at a photo of Lana in a ball gown.

  Jessica led us back out to the hall, to the door of the third room. “As you might imagine, Jasper and I grew up with a bit of a love for movies,” she said. “That’s what this room is for…”

  She opened the door and led us into a sort of mini movie theater. A massive white projection screen covered the entirety of the opposite wall, and there were eight comfortable-looking reclining chairs of a rich red color set into two rows of four in front of it. A few more framed posters of some of Lana’s other movies hung along the walls on either side of the chairs.

  “We call this the Silver Screening Room,” said Jessica fondly.

  “Talk about movie night!” said Sylvie, patting one of the red chairs.

  “We’ll have to have one all together!” said Jessica.

  We moved back out into the hall and Jessica led us to the fourth door.

  “A love of movies came with a love of clothes,” she said. “Well, in my case more than Jasper’s. Although, costumes is a better word than clothes…” She opened the door and we followed her inside. “This,” she said, “is the Wardrobe Room.”

  The girls and I gasped as we looked around at the room. It was like a combination of a costume shop and a seamstress’s workspace. There was row after row of every kind of clothing imaginable hung on the type of metal racks found in department stores. Aside from pants, shirts, shorts, skirts, dresses, hats and coats of every color and pattern, there were also garish outfits that could only be meant for Halloween, things like superhero capes and clown costumes. The most remarkable thing were the dozens of mannequins that filled the room, which stood on top of the long clothing racks on small circular metal platforms, in very detailed, life-like poses.

  It seemed that the purpose of these mannequins was to model the most outrageous and extravagant clothing the room had to offer. One modeled a poofy, violently maroon-colored dress that was all ruffles and lace, and which looked like it could have been at home in Ursula’s time. Another wore a suit that was fully made of shiny blue sequins, along with a matching hat. Most peculiar was one at the far end of the room which was dressed in a very realistic gorilla costume, its arms raised as if to scare someone. It looked like an actual person was inside it.

  It was strange that Jessica would bother with so much clothing w
hen witches had the ability to easily bring to life any outfit they saw inside a magazine. I thought of the Rebel Red jacket vanishing around me the previous night, and remembered that those spells were only temporary. It made sense that someone who loved clothes would want permanent versions.

  “Disguise spells in the cauldron are great,” said Jessica, sensing what I was thinking, “but it’s nice to have these clothes here all the time.”

  “Hell of a closet,” said Hortensia, gazing around at the mannequins.

  “Go ahead and look around,” said Jessica. “Try some things on if you want. Arthur, I know you don’t have any of your clothes here, so feel free to take anything you like.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, glancing at the violently maroon dress.

  The girls eagerly bounded forward into the aisles between the racks, and I followed after them. Sylvie pulled one of the superhero capes from its hanger with a smirk, and was about to throw it over her shoulders, when she hesitated and then put it back on the hanger.

  “You know what, I’m not going to do it,” she said. “Not the look I’m going for.”

  Lizzie reached into a rack and brought out a long pale pink dress with silk bows and a big fluffy skirt that looked like it was from the Victorian era. She walked to a full-length mirror standing by the wall, and held the dress over her own baby-blue one, sighing dreamily and swaying back and forth.

  Hortensia unearthed a powder-blue lacy corset and held it over her black jeans and System of a Down t-shirt with an expression of amused disbelief. She caught my eye and grinned.

  “Can you imagine?” she said, before putting it back on the rack.

  Sylvie moved on to a long sleeveless black dress, which had included with it some pearls and a glittering tiara. “Now this is nice,” she said, perching the tiara on her brown hair.

  I realized the outfit was a replica of Audrey Hepburn’s famous look from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I looked around and spotted another replica of a famous look, this one of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic white dress from the movie The Seven Year Itch. It seemed likely that somewhere in this room there could be a replica of the Rebel Red jacket of James Dean’s that I had become so fond of. I looked around for it, but settled for trying on a tall black top hat and matching tailcoat in the meantime.