by Kathryn Moon
“I know that it’s such a risk and I swear to you I would never abuse the power. I’ll never even use it, I promise!” I said.
Isaac smiled, faint and flickering, and his hands squeezed at mine. “I need you to know that…I’m still hurt. That you left us,” he said and when I opened my mouth to answer, apologize, he darted forward and pecked quick and soft against my lips. “I know you regret it and I…I do forgive you.”
“I won’t leave again, Isaac,” I whispered.
“I believe you,” he said, and then he winced a little and added, “I will. Time will prove it. But I’m telling you that doesn’t change how I feel. I trust you. Even if you had left us and said you didn’t want to be a part of the coven, didn’t want to belong with us. I would still trust you with this.”
“I love you,” I said, quick and clumsy because I was afraid he might say it first. And I wanted him to know that I meant it, and it wasn’t just an answer.
His eyes brightened and his cheeks dimpled and I jumped forward into his arms, kissing him fiercely. His arms wrapped around my waist, lifting me to my toes and a weight in my chest lightened.
“I love you, Joanna,” he said, pulling away and we both grinned. “I love you and I trust you to know me. Every bit.”
It was probably wrong to feel so giddy, walking back into the sun room hand in hand with Isaac. Especially given how grim Callum still looked, sitting on the floor staring blankly into the books. Aiden was busy transcribing music onto a piece of paper, tracing the notes in the air and grimacing as he worked through them. Tatsuo and Bryce looked up as we entered and Tatsuo’s expression brightened at seeing ours.
“With Bryce leading the trance, it accelerates the process. You’ll need to be focusing entirely on Isaac or the results will be aimless,” Tatsuo explained, placing a pencil in my hand and notebook in my lap.
“Gast,” Callum interrupted, looking up at Bryce. “Is it safe for them?”
“If it doesn’t work I will stop,” Bryce said shrugging. “But what happens in the trance is up to Joanna.”
“It’s just a practice,” I said.
“A test,” Isaac hedged. “To see if it’s even possible.”
Callum’s jaw worked but he nodded once. He and Aiden and Gwen and Hildy all cleared out of the room to the kitchen, leaving Isaac and I with Tatsuo and Bryce.
“Now Isaac, you’re…more of a prop in this situation,” Tatsuo said, taking Isaac by the shoulders and leading him away from me to the rug to sit. Bryce guided me over to sit across from him.
“If Joanna were experienced in this, and with a few years under her belt in the coven she could probably manage this without you. But having you here will help with the focus,” Tatsuo explained. Then he came to me and knelt down. “I’m going to leave in a minute. The fewer distractions the better. It’s important that you stay as relaxed as possible. You’ll want to direct the trance but it will flow best when you let it carry you. What’s important is maintaining your connection to Isaac.”
I nodded, trying to fight the grin on my face as I met Isaac’s gaze. But he was looking at me with those dimples in his cheek and the shade of his eyes had just gone the blue right before he kissed me. I couldn’t imagine not feeling connected to him in the moment.
“She’ll be fine,” Bryce said, smirking at me.
“You may not realize at first when you find his name,” Tatsuo said. “It isn’t a label, it’s portions of our soul. Just be open to what you find.”
“I will,” I said and Isaac’s lips twitched again, mine resisting the urge to answer his. “What happens if I don’t find his name?”
Tatsuo glanced at Bryce and they both shrugged at me. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll think of something else.”
Tatsuo coached me into a slow, regulated breathing to help with Bryce’s drone. I watched Isaac’s chest rise and fall steadily as he followed along, and that was its own kind of hypnotism. I didn’t notice as Tatsuo tip-toed out of the sun room. And at first I didn’t even notice as Bryce began to hum by the fireplace. It was all white noise and I had given my attention to Isaac completely.
My heart squeezed in my chest and our eyes linked over the space. The room around me dimmed as if to give Isaac my focus. The hum in my ear became a buzz and then a roar burrowing into my thoughts more than lingering in the air. Isaac was larger and closer in my vision with every second and every echoing wave of sound in my head. Bryce’s drone was overwhelming. For a moment, I wanted to tear away and ground myself again, in the sunroom and in myself.
But Isaac’s eyes, the familiar dusty blue, were locked to my face. And it was a color I had grown fond of, felt safe surrounded by. The room shifted, blurring into that blue and I settled. My heart thumped evenly, the beat joining the persistent burn of noise in my ears and head.
In one breath the rug scratched at my ankles and I felt the wood of the pencil between my fingers. In the next breath I was bodiless. I wasn’t in a room with Isaac but I could feel him all around me. The taste of paint was on my tongue and the sharp bite of the woods in my head. The droning was gone and replaced with something that sounded like the ocean, a twin rhythm of waves.
Heartbeats, I realized. Mine and Isaac’s.
The gray blue I was surrounded by fragmented in time with the beats. A flicker of new color appeared here and there until I was in a prism, hues flashing and spinning around me. They tangled and reshaped and overhead a blinding brilliance shined into a glare.
When it cleared I was in a wheat field, bright golden and shimmering with sunlight. There was no sound and no temperature and no taste or smell in the air but the colors were strong and abstracted. The sharp yellow brown of the grain, the near white blue of the sky, and a trim of green along the horizon.
The sun flared overhead and a sweep of dark rose up, like a hand shielding my eyes. The field twisted and the brown deepened and the scene shifted into a small kitchen. One like my own in Bridgeston, close and hot from the stove, with a small window and the sunset shining in. There was a faint whiff of cookies and a little melody, one my father had known but in a sweeter voice. A woman’s figure, monstrously tall—no, just large like adults were to a child—and distorted in shadow, passed at my side. She wore a vivid blue apron, and the fabric outshone everything in the room. It’s color was saturated and crisp and it made me feel immediately safe.
She went to the fireplace, back turned, and the blue vanished and the room went dark. The flare of the sun became the red glow of a dying fire. There was a scratch of splintered wood nipping at my palms and knees. A low growling sound rumbled from beneath the floor under me and there was shattering crack on the stone floor. Bottle green glittered and sparkled by firelight. The color was stark and queasy and made the pain of the wood splinters sharper. A coal hot anger rose up in me as the green gleamed and the room went blue black with night.
More of Isaac passed through me. A secret stash of paper and pencils kept under his mattress. Heart ache for the girl living down the lane and the boy who courted her. The blinding, glittering, first moment of stepping onto Canderfey, a blur of colors and so many of them new. Gawky, clean shaven Callum, barely more than a teenager and hiding behind a stack of books. Aiden’s hands starkly dark against the white keys of a piano.
White sheets and three bodies in bed, sunlight bouncing off their skin, throwing a pinkish brown halo into the hair. I ached as the color burned through me, a sweetness so painful it made the outline of my heart in my chest clear again through the trance. It was Callum, Aiden, and I in the bed, legs and arms tangled together. There was a dent on the mattress next to me where Isaac had just risen from. It could have been that morning or sometime in the future but the dawn pink light stretched over us like a fresh canvas until we were lost in the glow.
The pink flushed into the ruddy red skin of a screeching baby, and the noise was high in my ears, ringing like an alarm. The baby was wrinkled and still wet, inky black hair matted down to it’s head in tufts. It swat
ted one red fist and there was an emotion I had never known, something beyond love or ferocity or safety. It swallowed me up until my sight blurred.
The tears were hot in my eyes, streaking down my cheeks and my legs were numb underneath me. I blinked and the room cleared around me. Isaac had moved close, sitting knee to knee to me, and he reached up and swiped at the wetness over my cheeks. There was a little frown at the corner of his lips and I leaned forward at once, kissing it away, kissing him just for the sake of it.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I nodded, swallowing and hunting for my own voice.
Bryce beat me to words. “You didn’t write anything down.”
I glanced down. The pencil was still in my hand, the page blank.
“We can try again,” Isaac said.
I realized that they assumed the trance hadn’t worked and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s fine, it worked. I didn’t write anything.” Bryce’s eyes narrowed and I thought I probably sounded like I was babbling. “Can you give us a minute?”
They stood and left and Isaac’s fingers wiped away the last of my tears.
“Do you feel alright?” he asked again.
I sat up on weak knees and wondered how long we had been sitting together. It was dark outside but with sunlight missing it was hard to tell evening from midnight. I moved into Isaac’s space and he made way for me, pulling me close to his chest.
“I love you,” I said and his smile flickered back. “I’m fine. I didn’t write anything because there was nothing to write. Just color.”
Vivid blue, bottle green, rosy earth, squalling red.
Isaac’s eyes lit up at the news. “What- well maybe I shouldn’t know. Really?”
“Really,” I said, grinning.
“And nothing to scare you off?” he asked, a note wavering in the question.
“Nothing,” I said, drawing him in for a slow and thorough kiss. “What did it feel like? Did you notice anything?”
“It was like…having you close,” he said, smiling. “As if you’ve known me my entire life.”
The others came into the sun room and I knew by the relief on Callum’s face that Bryce had told them I had failed.
And then Isaac spoke.
“It worked. She found it.”
And Callum’s face fell.
He didn’t come to bed when we returned to the house. The trance had taken hours, another point in Callum’s argument against it, and there was exhaustion in everyone’s expressions. I didn’t fight against his refusal and no one else continued the discussion, but it was clear that he knew it was only a matter of time. They would end up needing me in whatever plan we formed against the Hollow and Callum would be outvoted.
“I don’t disagree with him,” Aiden mumbled in my bed as we lay down with Isaac to sleep. “I just think we all know he’s wrong.”
I huffed a laugh at the time and then lay awake until Isaac and Aiden fell asleep. Then I crawled out from the bed with a pillow under my arm and snuck down to Callum’s office. The glittering lamp I had written him was lit on the table and he was hunched in his armchair, dark circles shadowed under his eyes.
“If you’ve come to argue your case,” he growled, “I plan on being unreasonable.”
“I was thinking,” I said, dropping the pillow to the floor. I took a seat in front of the bookshelves and grabbed a discarded book from the pile around his feet. “What do you think would happen if I wrote ‘the Hollow is back in its cage and the cage is locked and cannot be unlocked?’”
Callum blinked at me over the rim of his glasses. “I think…we should have tried that already?”
“I did.” I said, passing my notebook full of the anxious scribbles of Isaac’s sick bed. His expression fell. “Now, since that didn’t work, what do we try next?” I asked.
Callum stared at me for a long stretch of silence and I waited. “Did you come down here in the middle of the night to strategize with me?” he asked, the angles in his face softening.
I nodded and waited as he took a long breath and sighed it out. He gathered up a collection of the books in front of him and then slid down from the chair, moving over to sit next to me. He passed me one of the books and flipped it open on my lap, something like sigils staring stark and black up from the page at me. One looked like a crescent moon with a jagged edge of teeth, and the other was twisted like a knot but with no sign of a beginning or end.
“This is an ancient alphabet, supposedly one belonging to gods. Or god like creatures. I thought maybe they might be…helpful,” Callum said, grimacing. “Except I’m not really sure what any of them mean.”
“I could try one out on the paper to see what happens,” I suggested, hiding my smile.
Callum took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. “I’m too tired to tell if you’re joking and I’m desperate enough to consider saying yes. Let’s talk about what parts of the caging spell we do understand.”
I left any further writing to him for the night. But we discussed phrases I might try to help stall for time or keep everyone safe. And slowly, and very late at night, we talked about how I might find the missing piece of the Hollow’s true name.
26. Joanna
When we opened the cupboards the next morning all the porcelain had been turned to dust. Hildy arrived an hour later to tell us the pack of campus stray cats had been found, injured but whole. Tatsuo was nursing two of the older tom cats who had been injured, and there was a litter of three kittens in need of a home. Aiden made one attempt to object and I cut him off before he could finish the sentence.
Callum found me and the kittens—an orange and white, a black and white, and a calico—by the fireplace in my bedroom. They scattered under chairs and, in the case of the orange and white boy, my skirt as he sat down with me.
“We shouldn’t wait,” I said.
He and I had barely made it to bed before dawn and the fresh round of bad news.
“We have a little time left,” he said, tapping his fingers on the rug and making the kitten under my skirt peek its head out. “Bryce says the Hollow probably never chose a name for itself which is why we call it by these spook titles. Nothing for your spells to pin down.”
Callum held still as the little tuxedo cat rushed bravely out and attacked his pant leg. He reached one finger out, scratched at its tail bone, and the kitten flopped onto its side with a roaring purr.
“What do we try next?” I asked.
He waited to speak until all the kittens reemerged, using him as a playful obstacle to climb and conquer.
“I’m afraid that if you use your connection with the Hollow it will make you more vulnerable,” Callum said. “That it may be able to manipulate the connection as well.”
“I’m afraid of that too,” I said. “But I trust you, the three of you and the others, to keep me safe.”
Callum stretched his hand out to mine, linking our fingers loosely, and the calico went tumbling down his leg to paw at our wrists. I smiled in spite of the conversation.
“I think instead of setting sigils I should be focusing on hexing…distracting the Hollow,” Callum said. “Keeping it busy while the rest of you work.”
“Gwen and Hildy and Tatsuo can handle the sigils,” I agreed. It was what we’d been saying for most of the day before.
Callum nodded loosely and then looked up at me. “If anything does happen, I’ll get you out.”
“I know,” I said, squeezing his hand.
It took another day of discussion and planning and Callum’s wired pacing through the house. But we set into the woods by full daylight, as distorted as it was, armed in every way we could be. Aiden carried his latest handmade violin, stained black for battle. Callum had a knife that looked as deadly sharp as it did heavy with power and runes. Isaac carried the rough slate tile I would write on and the others were all armed with ceremonial wands.