The sun streaked into the lake, and she kicked and heaved upward, but could not break from the cyclone. Her breath was gone, and she sucked in more water, her limbs going slack beneath her.
* * * *
Abby opened her eyes heavily and stared into nothing. The darkness was suffocating, and she spun in a circle ready to flee the death that had descended upon her. She moved left and struck a rock wall, slippery on her face and hands. Breathing, counting back from one hundred, she waited, and, finally, her eyes adjusted. An outline emerged. She was standing in a cave. Solid, slimy rock rose around her, and she stood too deep for any natural light to penetrate. Still, gradually, she could see. The air was gelatinous, but her body felt light, as buoyant as a soap bubble. The dim tunnel focused - still dark - but increasingly visible. She was definitely in a cave, and though brain damage crossed her mind, she dismissed it. She expected confusion or fear, but they did not come, only a longing to move forward, deeper into the darkness ahead.
She sensed a cold dampness but could not feel it on her skin. In fact, she felt almost nothing, no rapid heartbeat or sweating palms. She was an observer in her body.
The jagged rock walls spread out beside her, and she advanced. The cave shifted to a downward slope, and she picked up speed. Was she walking? No, not exactly, more like floating, swimming without movement. The tunnel narrowed, darkness stooped to meet her with low ceilings and close walls. Psychological claustrophobia threatened her, but again it could not find a place for its frantic fingers. The cave descended like a spiral into the center of the earth; she followed - mesmerized.
The tunnel forked into three passages, each glowing as if lit from a different source. She chose the path on her right where long, orange shadows sliced along the craggy walls like serpent tongues. The path tightened, barely more than an arm's length across, and appeared to end abruptly, but as she drifted forward, she saw that it was an illusion. The tunnel turned sharply. She continued around the bend where the cave yawned into a massive round room, ceiling-less. A black vacuum of night sky, stars like fireflies buzzing in its face, gaped overhead.
In the center of the room, a group of figures surrounded a blazing fire that crackled, sending flaming embers into the dark space overhead. A figure broke from the group and advanced towards her. The woman, Abby saw, had a single pale arm stretched from beneath her black cloak. Two glowing, green eyes peered from the pocket of darkness beneath the woman's hood, and her hair, as black as her cloak, danced on her shoulders electrically. In her palm, Abby saw a small, swirling ball of blue light. It spun and contorted, gradually forming a shape. The blue fell away, and an object emerged - an intricate silvery castle with turrets stretching upward like arrowheads.
Abby reached forward, overwhelmed with a desire to touch the castle, to feel the tangible body of an object conjured from nothing. Before her fingers could settle on the tiny fortress, it shimmered and then faded, like a hologram losing its light source.
The other figures detached from the fireside and moved around her, forming a circle. Abby felt a twinge of fear and a graying in the edges of her vision.
The figures began to chant and sway. A sea of black cloth billowed around her. Unconsciously, Abby tilted with them - her body drifting to their rhythm. Hands reached out from the cloaks and grasped her - flesh, but not flesh - embraced her, and then she began to dissolve into them. They all did, their cloaks fell to the floor as they merged into a single blue ball of energy, growing as they faded into her, became her, and she became them.
Chapter 10
Lips, wet and warm, pressed against her. A mouth, soft and giving, pushed in and then breath, fast like a balloon that's popped, exploded into her mouth and lungs. Abby choked, water spewed from her mouth, and then hands, rough on her shoulders, forced her sideways. Sand dug into her right bicep, along her hip and down her leg. She coughed and choked and opened her eyes to the beach, blazing in the midday sun. Sebastian's face hovered above hers, terrified.
He lifted her to his chest, her wet face on his hot, bare skin.
"You're okay, you're okay," he murmured again and again, a mantra. He lifted her, like a child, over his outstretched legs and slapped her back. More water trickled from her mouth. Her nose and throat felt like she'd snorted battery acid. She swallowed once, but it hurt too much to try again.
"Water," she croaked, and Sebastian turned her over, his eyes moving to her face like she might die anyway. "I'm okay."
"Holy shit," he whispered finally, realizing that Abby was conscious, that she was alive.
He stood and grasped her firmly, pulling her to her feet and then half carrying her, with his arm around her waist, back to the house.
Inside, she gulped two glasses of ice water on the couch, where he'd propped a pillow beneath her feet.
"You shouldn't have been swimming," he muttered, more to himself, than to her. "Those waves are huge today."
"I think I died," she said flatly, the vision of the cave coming back to her fully. She could feel the energy of the blue light, her energy, but not only hers, the others as well.
"Why?" He looked concerned and not at all skeptical.
"I was in a cave with all these figures, but it was so real, and then I turned into this blue energy, and we all became, like one entity."
He stared at her and said nothing.
"It didn't feel like a dream, it felt real."
She massaged her throat, sore and still burning, but less so than on the beach.
"Maybe it wasn't death," Sebastian said, finally.
She thought about what else it might have been: a dream, a hallucination, perhaps a journey to another dimension. It felt too heavy for her brain. She didn't have the energy to go there.
"You need to rest." He grabbed a blanket from the couch-end.
She stretched out, and he tucked the blanket around her. She shivered in spite of the heat and nestled her head into the pillow that he'd been using the previous few nights. It smelled like him, and the scent comforted her.
* * * *
Sebastian closed the guest bedroom door quietly - not wanting to disturb Abby, who, he hoped, slept soundly downstairs. He felt nauseated, and the headache he'd faked earlier had come on passionately. He popped four painkillers in his mouth and chased them with a cup of green tea, propping the glass on his bedside table.
Had she nearly died? He didn't think so, some gut instinct told him, "no." And her vision, her near-death dream, rang all too familiar. He knew that he had read about it before, that Claire had written about something similar in her journal.
He pulled a box, one of many, across the floor, and peeled back the cardboard flaps. Claire had kept several journals, all in cheap dime-store notebooks, which were tattered from his overzealous searches through their pages. The words, mostly written in pencil, were smeared in some spots, and he'd tried to touch them up with pen. He intended to type it all, at some point, but there was never time.
He found the green notebook, one of her first, and carefully turned the pages, touching only the corners to keep the oils from his fingers from tainting the loopy cursive of Claire's hand. He had read most of the journals, though not all of them. After her death, it took months to even get them out, to look at the words without tears splattering and ruining her carefully documented experiences.
He found the excerpt:
'Adora gave me a wonderful gem of knowledge yesterday and put to rest a concern that has plagued me for months. The dream that I had, the dream that acted almost as a catalyst to this newfound power, was an initiation of sorts. Adora called it 'The Majestic Rite' and said that we all experienced it at the onset of our powers. She said that, during the rite, three things occurred: suffering, death and rebirth. She asked about the dream, and I told her that it happened when I was very ill. I had a high fever and thought that I was dying. Sebastian was worried sick. I thought that the dream was a result of my fever, but the cave had been real. I woke from it knowing that I was more than this,
more than this physical body, and that the light, the blue light, made me one of them, the figures around the fire. Adora said that I was right and now I have a name for it: 'The Majestic Rite'.
Sebastian closed the journal and leaned back against the bed, resting his head on the wood frame. He closed his eyes against the pain of remembering Claire, the sharp stabs that arose whenever he looked at her journals and found himself back in the past, when she still lived.
Abby. Now he had Abby, and each passing hour seemed to dump another load of evidence into his lap. Evidence that she was special, that he had found her for a reason. Was she one of them? Or simply experiencing the dreams vicariously through him, somehow? He put the journal back and returned the box to the others.
He needed to think, which meant he needed to drive. The drum of the wheels on the road had soothed him ever since his parents' death. He used to take Claire for drives. In the beginning, the drives were necessary. She refused to get in the car for months after the accident, but he coaxed her. At first, they just drove around the block - eventually making wider loops until their drives were hours long and they'd visited cities far outside of their own. He taught Claire to drive, and sometimes he napped in the passenger seat while she drove to Chicago or Michigan or just miles into farm country.
He didn't leave Abby a note, assuming that she would sleep for a while, and pulled out of Sydney's driveway looking for a long stretch of open road.
* * * *
The phone shrilled in Abby's ear. Her head, sunk deeply into the pillow, was only inches from the gray plastic as it shook. Abby opened her eyes groggily. Her lips stuck together and made a loud smacking noise when she opened her mouth fully, trying to wake up, but continuing to hang between this world and the last. The back of her eyelids projected visions of the dead girl, the dead woman, the dead thing that wanted to drag her into the lake.
She shook her head and moaned. The phone, louder than ever, shrieked again near the top of her head. Not thinking, or maybe thinking that anything was better than that dead thing, she fumbled, grasped the receiver, and thrust it to her ear.
"H'lo?" she mumbled, almost too quiet to hear in her raspy voice.
"Abigail? Abigail, is that you?" Abby's mother's voice came like a sharp kick to the side of her head.
She grimaced, pulled the phone away and forced her eyes open all of the way. Sydney's living room slowly materialized. Abby stared down at the checkered blanket rumpled across her legs, her white feet poking out. The suede couch felt sticky beneath her, sweat sticky, and she struggled to sit up.
"Mom?" she asked, not really asking, but too fuzzy to say anything else.
"Abigail Daniels, what in the name of the Good Lord is going on? I have been absolutely worried sick about you. Do you hear me, missy? Abigail?
"Abby, mom, okay? Abby."
"What's wrong with your voice? Are you taking drugs?"
Abby snorted and covered the phone, too late.
"Are you laughing at me, Abigail Daniels?"
"No, mom, I sneezed, and I swallowed some water in the lake, that's why my voice is scratchy."
"Oh, yes, I'm sure that you just swallowed some lake water. Nick's let me know exactly what you're up to, and I'm telling you that the buck stops here. I am going to call Sydney and give her a piece of my mind for letting this go on under her roof. What is she running a brothel up there?"
"Are you finished?"
"Am I finished?" her mother seethed, and Abby imagined her standing in her narrow kitchen, twisting the phone cord frantically around her wrist while the shopping network blared from the living room.
"This," Abby snapped, "is why I didn't call you, mother. Because I knew that if I tried to be honest and let you know that I was unhappy, you'd just torment me until I stayed."
"How dare you speak to me that way? After all I've done for you, Abigail. You must stop this, immediately!" She enunciated every word. If they were written, it would be all caps with giant exclamation points after each syllable.
"I CAN-NOT DO THIS RIGHT NOW!" Abby yelled into the phone, and then reached behind her and smashed it onto its base.
She was now fully awake and filled with a blind rage that left her momentarily frozen on the couch, back stiff and hands clenched on her knees like they were stress balls and not sensitive joints filled with bone and cartilage. She forced a few deep breaths and then thirstily drank the last of the water that Sebastian had left on the coffee table.
Abby shoved off the couch, her mother's words ringing in her ears. Normally, her mother was an expert emotional blackmailer, but this time Abby had stood up for herself. In fact, it had not even crossed her mind to bow down to her mother's rant. Her mother, who considered suffocation and love to be synonymous, had finally been forced back.
From a small child, Abby's mother had played her like a puppeteer plays her dummies. "Dance," she'd say, and Abby danced. She danced and sewed and ice-skated. She took anti-depressants, attended college close to home, and even cut her hair the way that her mother (and Nick) recommended. She stayed with Nick, long after their relationship had curdled, largely because her mother adored him.
Suddenly, she was liberated from the maternal talons that had been clutching her spine since birth.
In the kitchen, she drank another glass of water and then dug out bread and cheese, which she munched angrily as she mentally blacked out every piece of advice her mother had ever given her. "Abigail, your fingernails are ghastly," her mother used to say. "Wipe off that paint right now." And she would wipe it off. She skipped navel piercing, tattoos and parties at her mother's command.
How many Friday nights had she spent carefully supergluing porcelain faces on little doll bodies stuffed with cotton? Even as a child, Abby had hated dolls and yet she dedicated half of her adolescence to assembling the freakish things and piling them on her bedspread, exactly as her mother liked them. They never stopped, the dolls, arriving in gleaming white trucks, ordered from some infomercial or magazine ad. They came in wooden boxes, stiff with packing straw, their glass eyes staring out from disembodied heads. 'Suzie, Sissy, Madeleine, Ginger, Heather'. Her mother named every one. She named three of them Abigail, insisting that they looked like her daughter with their thick, frizzy curls and empty brown eyes.
Abby reached up and touched her hair, crinkled where she'd lain on it. It smelled like lake water. She pulled a long butcher knife from the wooden block next to Sydney's sink, reached for a clump of hair and sliced. The blade did not cut easily; it grated back and forth on the strands, a stylist's worst nightmare, but Abby hacked away, ignoring the clumps of brown that fell at her feet. She did not stop until her hair stood in ear length strands, bits brushed her cheek and others stood erect, too short to lay flat on her scalp. She dropped the knife; it clattered in the sink where she left it.
In Sydney's closet, she found tight black stretch pants and a glittery red tank top that said Jamaica in leather block letters. She dug out a bottle of nail polish and painted her toes and fingernails red, not bright red, but a darker one, the color of blood. She put on red lipstick and scared herself when she glanced in the mirror. Who was that face looking back? Her cheeks were bone white, her lips looked like she'd been kissing a bloody carcass and gotten her teeth involved in the process. She opened her mouth wide and licked the lipstick off her teeth, grinning. Her brown hair could have belonged to a Chia Pet who'd spent the day with a group of five year olds. She sprayed some mousse in her hand and fluffed it up, somehow making it better and worse, as it stiffened into a helmet of spirals.
She kept waiting to hear Sebastian clunking around downstairs, but when she looked out the window, she saw that he had left. Had he left for good? Had she scared him away?
She barely entertained the thought as she pushed open the guest bedroom door. A blue duffel bag lay open on the bed and in the corner half a dozen boxes were stacked.
She did not consider Sebastian's privacy as she walked boldly into the room, shuffling the cloth
es in his suitcase. He appeared to own only two types of clothing: t-shirts and jeans, all torn and unwashed. She lifted an orange Bob Marley shirt to her face and sniffed. It stank of sweat and aftershave, but she liked it and carefully smoothed it on the bed, tracing her fingers along the collar.
Moving to the boxes, she crouched and looked for labels, but none were marked. She picked one out, pulled the flaps open and peered inside. Loose leaf papers were stuffed at various angles, some water marked and coffee stained. She dug beneath the papers, and her fingers brushed leather. Trying to move the papers aside without damaging them further, she lifted out a heavy, leather-bound book. The words Astral Coven were engraved in the upper left corner and stained red. The book looked and smelled old, its heavy thickness balancing on her knees. She slid her hands along the cover, the smooth leather cold to the touch.
She did not have a plan or even a thought as she dived into Sebastian's personal life. She had only a hunger for power, for knowledge.
She slipped her index finger beneath the bulky shield, opening it gingerly. The pages were old, fragile, and reminded her of the crumbling bodies of B-grade mummy flicks. She wondered if Sebastian was carting around ancient family heirlooms and felt vaguely disappointed that it was not his journal. The first page held a long list of names, each written in French cursive, the letters elegantly and painstakingly placed on the page. She hunched over the book, squinting at each tiny name, barely legible after years of fading. She recognized none, but realized that the list went on and on, ten pages, at least, of the packed identities, most likely long ago dead and buried. Beyond the names came another section that listed various recipes, some in English, others scrawled in languages that Abby did not recognize. She peered closely at a recipe titled 'Darken The Moon'. The recipe, which looked more like a poem, read:
Born of Shadows- Complete Series Page 8