by J. Kowallis
Sitting cross-legged, I open my own grimoire—the felt pen tucked inside the book where it had been stressing the spine. Angie’s book, I rest in my lap. She expects me to sleep for at least the next five hours. If five hours of study time is all I get for now, so be it.
The third book, one of the Hexe de at Forgaite volumes, I set next to me. Finally, I close my eyes and center my breathing. This next spell is going to take a fair amount of energy to perform, and I’m already exhausted.
After all, it’s a lot of books.
I rehearse the same summoning spell in my head, trying to accomplish my craft without vocal spells, as Angie’s been challenging me to do. The hollow, echoing sound of my fingers snapping reverberates in my head. The moment the spell is cast, I feel it. A ripple from the back of my skull, down my neck, through each fiber of muscle, and out my fingertips. The weight of nearly forty twenty-pound books seems to press down on my body. My shoulders hunch.
Then, the pressure releases.
When I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by my entire personal library of hexen books. Every volume I had back at my flat. Each book that I don’t remember collecting, but have—at some point—organized, tagged, outlined, notated, and cataloged.
The first thing I need to know: how to perform an actuve. And something tells me that with the magic I was dabbling in before, I won’t come up empty handed. But I won’t get anywhere very fast tonight if I have to pick up each and every book and individually scan them. Even magically.
Settle my breathing. Listen to the air.
I hold my hands out in front of me as if I were resting my wrists on my knees, palms up. Only, instead of touching my legs, my arms hover about three inches above them. I close my eyes.
“Svámoie,” I whisper in the dark room. In the stillness of the room, the auditory movement of each book is clear. Pages shift, hard covers collide softly with each other, and the unnatural sense that I’m surrounded settles in. After opening my eyes once more, I look around to see every single book hovering in the air, angled slightly away from me. Slowly, they follow the same track pattern in the air, spinning around me at a measured, leisurely pace.
I think of the right spell in my mind and hold up a hand. A signal to stop. The books quit revolving.
I look to the first book floating right in front of me. “Fiehe ana actuve,” I command. The pages of the book violently whirl, fluttering from the front of the book to the back. When the last page flips over, the book closes. There’s no information there.
With a wave of my hand the books move again, rotating to the left. The moment the next book is in front of me, I whisper the same command. “Fiehe ana actuve.”
Once more, the pages flutter. Flying from the first page to the last page. The book closes.
I motion for the books to shift to the left again. I search the third book. The fourth, fifth, and sixth. Then, on the seventh, the pages stop fluttering about three quarters of the way through the book and settle. The book is one from my home collection. Green leather, gold foil border on the cover with the image of the Ravn seal on the front in the same gold foil embossing. Two ravens seemingly joined at the hip, one looking right, one looking left. The same symbol on Angelica’s crest candles.
How did I even get my hands on this book in the first place?
I lean forward to scan the two pages that are open to me, running my finger across the old paper. The script is written in an old English fashion, but the language is undeniably hexen and painted with both black and red ink. I’d guesstimate its age to be around seven hundred years old. Even more interesting is the layout of the text. Paragraphs start and end at varying points on the page, creating large holes of blank space in the center of the page.
“Afslochtan,” I whisper, thinking perhaps that there are words and letters magically hidden.
The reveal spell does nothing. Not a shift or change on either page. Perhaps words have been magically removed and not simply hidden.
So, I start to read. It talks about the wars of the hexen clans, which, in and of itself, takes me back. If this was written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, most hexen clans would have gone into hiding, living like alemflus. Regular humans. Then again, I have to remind myself that none of these are traditional books of academia. These are something else I scrounged up for myself at some point. Not written by human, but hexen. Even then, that’s like me trying to write a history book based off events a thousand years ago that I wasn’t around to witness.
It talks about the disintegration of the Druw clan, how those families intermarried with Grims and select Ravn leaders. Of course, it mentions Woden and Frig, the latter of which was born into the Druw clan. It goes on to mention the rise and fall of a war started in 1557 BC by the Grims. However, considering this is a Ravn text, it’s hard to say what the truth is exactly. It could be very true, or slightly warped. That’s how history works, even in the human world.
And then, I see the word.
Actuve.
My eyes bounce back and read the full paragraph.
After which, take heed, saith Zonne. Vengeance is mine only, lest hexen be damned to the realm of the second for manifesting craft unworthy of the user. Honour the earth, thine ancestors, and High Zonne by abstaining from the practice of the dark ways of possession, infliction, violation, and death.
I reread the hexen words once more: actuve, folsadur, ovátren, o bása tás.
I recognize the four evils immediately. Shockingly, I actually remember that from one of my earliest learning sessions with my móraí.
Beyond the mention of the actuve, it says nothing more. I wave the book shut and wave my hand to the left, rotating around to the next book. And the next. And the next.
The books floating around me are arranged into concentric circles. Five levels to be exact. When I finish scanning the first circle, I motion upward with my hand and the first level expands to accommodate the second level dropping down to take its place. I scan every single book on the second row, including an extremely old grimoire belonging to an ancestor of mine from the third century. But, still nothing.
Again, I motion upward and as the books shift and make way for each other. I feel my eyes drooping. Fighting against the exhaustion, I tell myself I can’t. Coll may be still alive inside his body. There’s still . . . there has to be a possibility that he’s locked away.
No—
I shake my head, pausing the books in the air.
He’s still in there. It’s not a possibility. There’s no maybe. He is there, I tell myself.
The air presses in around me. All those feelings from earlier—the fear, the pain—it all comes back. I bend my knees and tuck my head down as a series of large tears roll down my face and smear across my legs, mixing with the smell of lake water and grass. I take in a deep breath and a long, agonizing groan reverberates in the back of my throat.
Coll.
Oh, spirits, I’m so tired. So tired.
A chill licks underneath the bedroom door and drifts across my skin while more tears drizzle from my eyes and down my legs. I feel them, mostly in the basic objective way. I’m aware of them. I know they’re there, but I’m lost. My thoughts, my guilt, my loss. But there are my tears. Whether exhausted tears, or simple pain, I don’t know.
I lift my head and rub at my eyes with my cold fingers. I can’t do this. I can’t fall apart. Not now. I sit up and square my shoulders. Puffy eyes, inflamed sinuses, and all. I don’t care how tired I am or how it feels like my soul is imploding, I’m not going to allow Coll to stay a prisoner in his own body. I need answers now.
“Fiehe ana actuve,” I say when the first book stops in front of me. The pages flutter, spin, and settle. Followed by the closed book cover. Nothing.
I take a deep breath and widen my eyes to try and shake the weight from them. Instead, my swollen lids instinctively close and my head bobs, startling me awake again.
“Whorla. I need whorla,” I say to myself with a quivering voi
ce.
Leaving the books to hover in the air, I slip through them and quietly tiptoe toward the stairs. I stop on the top stair when I hear a voice gently floating down the hallway. A faint light spills out from under Angie’s door just a few steps away. Softly, I tiptoe until I reach her door.
Flagibet, I think to myself. The moment the spell is cast, the voice I heard before intensifies and it’s much easier to understand. The words are still muffled, but even if they weren’t, I still wouldn’t recognize the spell. It’s not one Angie taught me, and definitely not one that I ran into throughout my own books and collections.
“It’s a transparency spell.”
I jump, nearly tripping over my own two feet. Alaric quietly walks up to me, black tube socks on his feet, sweat pants tucked into the tops, a white t-shirt, and everything finished off with a nasal strip taped across his nose like a cherry on top of a banana split. He folds his arms, taking a deep breath.
“Transparency spell. For what?” I ask, hoarsely.
Alaric swallows. “I can imagine she’s trying to access something. Look into something that she can’t open.”
“Then wouldn’t an unlocking spell do the job?” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “I’ve been listening to her for a while through the wall. For the last couple of nights now. I don’t think it’s something she wants to open.”
“Why not?”
“Taran,” my dad drops his head for a while and then looks up to me, “you’ll find there are a great many secrets in our world that should remain secrets. I suspect Angie’s being protective of those very mysteries.”
I frown, shaking my head. “Why? That doesn’t make sense. At a certain point, the same secrets we try to hide eventually come out. They always do.”
He shakes his head. “And some that do, never should.”
“Who gets to make that call?” I press. “Especially when some secrets may . . .”
Dad holds up his finger as we hear Angie’s voice stop. “It’s time for bed,” he mostly mouths to me, his voice so quiet I barely even hear him.
I purse my lips and look down toward the stairs. “I need some whorla.”
“No, you don’t,” he says, reaching for my arm.
“Dad, don’t.” I pull my arm back and Alaric pauses. He just . . . stands there, staring at me. “What?” I ask.
There’s a smile tugging on his lips and then he says, “You called me ‘Dad’ without correcting yourself.”
Tingling waves of nerves ripple through my skin and my mouth parts. I’m shocked by my own words. It came out of my mouth so easy, so fluid, I wouldn’t have even noticed if . . . Dad hadn’t said something.
I respond with a tired smile, and almost say something before Angie’s doorknob jostles. I jump away from her door just as it swings open, framing her body in gentle candlelight. The middle-aged hippie woman stands there in a rose-patterned sleep dress, her hair knotted up and secured with an unlit incense stick.
“Is this a party?” she asks.
“No, Taran and I were just headed to bed. Weren’t we?” he eyes me.
I’m a horse hair’s width from confessing that I’m actually going to the kitchen, when my vision goes cross-eyed on me. The fatigue knocks on the back of my eyeballs. I start to think that all the whorla in the world couldn’t keep me awake at this point.
“Yeah,” I nod. “I just had to . . . use the bathroom.”
“Uh huh,” Angie rolls her eyes. Before she closes the door and retreats into her room once more, she darkly looks at me for a moment. Then, she winks. And she’s gone.
Without another word, Dad turns away from me and goes into his own room, leaving me alone in the middle of the narrow hallway. I could very well go to the kitchen, but I’m tired. I just want to sleep.
I want to scream the moment the remorse hits me. Simply contemplating bed reminds me that Coll is still counting on me. Waiting for me.
Oh, shit. I’m so tired.
In the end, I give into the guilt and head for the stairs.
“And where do you think you’re going?” Angie’s voice chases after me.
I turn around to see her peeking out at me from a crack of her open door again. “I was just—”
“I know what you were just doing. You’re Marlis Grim’s granddaughter who happens to be infatuated with my foster son. If I know you, you’ve been searching books in your room . . .” her face softens and the door opens by a few more inches, “crying. Taran, are you going to be okay?”
My eyes droop again, and I nod. “Yeah. I just—I don’t have time to rest.”
“So, you’re off to get tea or perhaps something a bit more potent to keep you awake while you search?” Angie opens the door all the way. “You’re stubborn. Just like she is.”
I shake my head. “I can’t turn my back on him.”
“No one asked you to.”
“Angie, he’s trapped.”
“Yes, and he’s my foster son. Between the two of us, we’ll find something. I know I’m beating a dead horse by saying this, but for now,” her voice hardens, “you need to sleep.”
“Is that what you were doing?” I smugly dig.
Angie folds her arms and narrows her eyes. “I was praying to the ancestors.”
“Liar.”
“Go to bed, Taran. We’ll save Coll tomorrow,” her voice cuts.
A firm breath of air escapes my nose and I concede. “Fine.”
With my door firmly closed behind me, I hear Angie’s finally shut. Any sounds from the house go silent. The books still float in the air, waiting for me. I wave my hand, thinking of the right spell, and the books organize themselves into piles. Only now, thoughts about Ruhmactír and what he did . . . the things I’d rather hide away . . . they all begin to replay.
Lying on a bed is the last thing I want to do right now. Instead, I pull off the additional yellow throw resting on the foot of the bed—as well as the comforter—and place them both on the floor near the stacks of ancient books.
Setting my pillow on the floor at the head of that yellow throw, I lay down, pulling the blanket on top of me. I catch a glimpse of my hand, Craniarann still protected in the circle, and rub at it with my other thumb.
I blink once. Twice.
The last thought I have before I fall into a bottomless pit of sleep is about Angie. She has something in her room. Something she doesn’t want to open, but something she wants to use. And I want to know what that is.
Thirteen
I sleep almost until eleven. Which, in and of itself, is enough to shock me out of my sleep. I crunch a few ribs and bones as I roll over on the floor where I passed out last night. Angie practically has to force me to eat breakfast (porridge with caramelized apples) in between writing new spells in my grimoire and sneaking peeks at the other books around me in the off chance that I might find something that will help to retrieve Coll. During lunch, I set down my own grimoire, which is half-way filled with important spells and ingredients, and head to my bedroom with three more of the books I didn’t get to look through last night.
During my search, a familiar prophecy pops up.
Sisters will clash.
A staff, a sword, a tablet is riven.
A magic age—a wolf age, before the world falls
In the summers that follow.
It’s not exactly relevant to what I need now, so I dog ear the page knowing that Angie will kill me for doing so. After a couple hours, Angie calls me back to the kitchen to work on more spells and build my grimoire.
With each spell I practice and learn—evil wards, sleeping draughts, moon patterns, ancestral petitions—I find myself becoming more and more anxious. Impatient. I keep thinking to myself, these aren’t the spells I should be practicing. I should be working on finding ways to expel souls, trap evil instead of just keep it away, and kill someone seemingly immortal.
“I still don’t understand why you need me to work on this.” I run my fingers through my hair.
<
br /> Angie carries a stack of her books into the living room and sets them down on the coffee table. “I don’t need you to do anything. You’re doing this for you. There’s a very real chance you might need additional skills like this as we free Coll. And,” she pushes up her flared sleeves, “at the very least it’ll give you some respite from your own unfounded guilt.” She squeezes my arm and softly adds, “I’ll keep looking through my books for how to help Coll. You need to do this.”
Before leaving my side, Angie leans over my shoulder and hands me four hand-written potions. All of which she intends for me to make and add to my own grimoire. The faster I complete them, and complete them correctly, the faster I can get back to my own search.
I rush through the processes as if I’m being timed in a cooking special on the Food Network. I talk to myself as I go along, looking for herbs or liquid components, cooking, grinding, or cutting ingredients. It only takes me two hours to finish all four potions. I package them into their own individual bottles or bags. When I drop them on the pages Angie is studying, she looks up at me and slowly picks up the first bottle.
“Common poison antidote.”
The next one she picks up is a sachet, eyeing me.
“Sleeping draught.”
Before she can pick up the other two, I point them out and recite their names, “Magic binding potion, and a protection potion.”
“And you are sure you did them right?”
“I wouldn’t be handing them to you if I wasn’t. Now, I’m going to keep looking for a way to help Coll.”
She watches me for a while before she yells out, “No. Stay here. Alaric!”