Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  "Let the adventure begin," he said, carefully taking the cage.

  Abby nodded and accepted Helena's quick, fierce hug.

  ****

  Abby and Sebastian walked away from the castle, meandering beyond the second lagoon. The island that the Coven of Ula inhabited in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was sprawling and picturesque. In October everything shimmered in gold. Amber colored leaves and the sweet golden light of autumn created its own magic.

  They followed a trail that Helena had described in detail the night before. A large forest of old-growth cedars stood at the southern tip of the island. The dense canopy of trees blocked most of the light from their footpath. Abby walked mindfully, carefully side-stepping any signs of life on the forest floor. As she grew more connected to the energy of the earth, she felt spirit in everything. At times she shuddered to squish a blade of grass.

  "Hey, check it out," Sebastian exclaimed, pointing ahead.

  An ancient-looking stone stairway curved up out of the forest floor, roughly chiseled into a corroded limestone wall. The stairs were moss covered and crumbling. A delicate braid of flowers and vines created an archway over the stairs. Handmade chimes hung from a low-hanging branch. They tinkled softly in the breeze.

  "Shall we?" Sebastian asked, holding out his hand.

  She took it and bit back the warning that the steps looked ready to collapse.

  They walked slowly, pebbles sliding underfoot and toppling to the leafy forest floor. Overhead orange and gold leaves shimmered in the mid-day sun.

  Abby felt her heart rise into her throat when they left the stairwell and emerged into the cliff-top meadow that Helena had described the night before.

  "The floating garden," Abby murmured and knew that she had plucked its name from a collective mind that was not her own, but a dozen cumulative witches' memories.

  They were not in a field and not in a forest, but a lovely marriage of the two with twisted trees that plunged into the earth, their branches rose ecstatically toward the blue sky. The ground was a dazzling parade of violets and yellows and reds, the flowers in full blooms of magenta and turquoise. Radiant gold reeds floated next to heaps of glossy ferns. In October, the flowers should have been dead, dried and crumbling onto beds of browning leaves, but in this enchanted garden, the plants lived on. The flowers, however, held only a piece of the charm. The whole garden appeared to genuinely float. The meadow flowed into blue sky and Abby steadied her hand against Sebastian's back to calm the sense that she'd left solid ground.

  "Whoa," he laughed, teetering momentarily to the side. He moved hastily to one of the gnarled trees. He placed a palm against it and then quickly pulled away.

  "Touch it," he told her.

  She did and a thousand voices converged in her mind. Not human voices, but the twittering and whispering and laughter of some other life. She leaned into the tree and rested her forehead against it, an overpowering sense of love embracing her. For an instant, she swooned and then the sensations subsided and she returned, sort of, to reality.

  A narrow red stone path wound through the garden and, when they both felt confident of their footing, they picked their way along, single file, neither wanting to crush even a petal.

  Abby could not see the cliff edge ahead. The trees' hanging branches blocked their view, but Helena said that they would know the right spot when they found it. A blue and black butterfly drifted lazily ahead of Sebastian, alighting briefly on the bird cage before she took flight.

  "A blessing," he said, clearly delighted by the small creature as she danced away.

  Abby felt a strong surge of Yes and grinned as the butterfly disappeared into a mass of purple chrysanthemums.

  "Whoa, careful," Sebastian called back, stopping abruptly. The flowers did not end, but trickled over the steep cliff edge. The rock wall plunged one-thousand or more feet, ending at a platoon of jagged rocks that drowned again and again in the surging dark water.

  Abby turned in a slow circle, looking behind her, but as she shifted her gaze, she spotted an outcrop twenty feet below them. It was a flat rock ledge, heavy with flowers and, in its center, stood a still pond. Beside the pond lay an enormous starry quilt.

  "That must be for us..." Sebastian said, taking Abby's hand and starting along the cliff.

  Abby felt the tiniest prick of fear at the thought of getting to the blanket. It was such a long way to fall. One small slip of a foot and... But before the fear could take hold, her heart swelled and she felt overwhelmed by the power within her and more, by the power surging from the enormous lake below. She felt light enough to fly.

  They discovered another stairway, this one significantly cruder than the last. It was cut into the side of the cliff and reminded Abby of that dark hole in the earth where the Lourdes of Warning lived. She blinked the memory away.

  "Okay, let's do it," she murmured and picked her way down the stairs. She demanded that Sebastian let her carry the bird cage, despite his insistence that he could handle it.

  Once settled comfortably on the quilt, Abby pulled the small scroll that contained her incantation from her pocket. She unfurled it gently, holding it flat against a rock on the pool's edge. She glanced down and caught her reflection. Her curly hair was wild and the blissful smile on her face rendered her momentarily unrecognizable. When had she ever smiled like that?

  Sebastian moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. She sighed heavily, happily and they stood for a moment letting time ebb away. She breathed deeply and savored the scent of cinnamon on his breath and the steady pressure of his chest as it rose and fell into her back. A lump moved into her diaphragm and her throat caught and she resisted the urge to turn around and sob uncontrollably against him. The dark mood passed and, when he released her, she returned to the scroll.

  Abby shrugged off her boots and turned towards the sky, opening her arms wide. She moved ankle-deep into the soft, cold water of the pool and began to chant. Sebastian murmured in unison, looking to his own copy of the prayer.

  Her chant was written in Latin, translated by dictionary, but as she whispered a final call to her beloved Aunt Sydney, the words grew into giants reaching into the sky to bring the spirit of her aunt back to her one last time.

  She turned in a circle counter-clockwise and the water began to turn with her.

  Behind her, Sebastian opened the bird cage. The tiny paper bird rested on his hand and he looked uncertainly at Abby. She nodded and he held it toward the sky.

  The water churned faster, whirl-pooling up to her knees.

  Overhead the blank, blue sky swirled with the water beneath her. A flash, white and blinding, streaked down to them.

  Abby heard paper wings gently rubbing and turned to see Sebastian watching the paper bird, transfixed.

  He moved to her and she cupped her palms around his. The paper wings flapped and fluttered and the tiny, inky eye blinked once before the wind caught her and she took flight.

  "Oh," Abby reached out, and almost thought of clutching the bird, but Sebastian stopped her, pulling her closer to him. They watched the paper bird glide high and then drop and spiral back down to them. It lit just above their heads, skimmed across the garden and then turned out to Lake Superior where it quickly disappeared over the horizon.

  "Goodbye," Abby breathed.

  ****

  "What is it, love? You seem so...far away today?" Elda asked Bridget gently.

  They were in the elixirs room, bottles stacked to the ceiling, all with tiny neat labels in Bridget's perfect calligraphy.

  Bridget's brow furrowed and she stood on a step stool, hovering over satchels of dried herbs. Her round body held the grace of someone much more proportional.

  "It's something, some sign..." She trailed off and Elda moved closer, sensing her distress.

  Bridget nearly always exuded a supreme aura of tranquility and any agitation in her energy immediately alerted Elda.

  "Tell me," she prodded her. Bridget, one of the coven's m
ost intuitive witches, was also one of their most unsure. She came to her powers late in life and never truly felt at ease with them.

  "Twice now, when I've been mixing the elixir of Samhain, a symbol has appeared."

  Bridget did not look Elda in the eyes, but instead hurriedly began crushing herbs in her mortar, sprinkling in bits of cacao.

  "What symbol did you see, dear?" Elda continued, gently.

  "Well, I cannot be sure, but it seemed to be a...a black widow spider."

  Elda frowned and immediately opened herself to the coven. Could she sense some treachery? Bad tidings? Nothing, nothing out of the ordinary. Somewhere, far away, she could feel Abby and Sebastian bidding farewell to Sydney. Closer, she felt the heat of Lydie, angry with Max for pressing her into her astral-travel, but doom? She did not sense that.

  "Are you sure, Bridget? Might it not have been some other symbol?"

  "Well, of course it might have been." Bridget flustered, wringing her hands. "It might have been a flower, for Pete's sake. I mean, you know how off I can sometimes be..."

  But that wasn't true. Not really. Bridget was rarely off, but Elda could nearly always validate her intuition. She had merely to tune into the symbol, the premonition, and it would rise up from its shadow and be known. This time, she felt nothing strange at all. In fact, she felt a profound sense of peace and good tidings.

  "Knock, knock," Helena called. She walked in behind them, holding a bundle of dried sage.

  Bridget hurried over and took the sage. Elda understood that, for now, the subject had been dropped.

  ****

  Sebastian had packed them a picnic, including Sydney's favorite coconut cake, which he had baked for the occasion. They ate sandwiches and fruit and talked about the good times that they had both spent with Sydney in their earlier lives. Abby hung on Sebastian's every word, loving the stories of Sydney that he alone claimed.

  "Oh, she was a nightmare around my dad," he sighed, leaning back on his elbows and grinning at the sky. "A terrible flirt, and it drove my mom wild. I still remember one summer we went to visit her with Grams for a long weekend, and Sydney came trotting out to our van wearing high heels and a white bathing suit. White, practically see-through! I swear I could see smoke coming out of my mom's ears."

  Abby giggled and took another gulp of sweet cherry wine. The alcohol softened the edges of the world and she felt dizzy and buoyant.

  "Yeah, she had no filters. When she met Rod, I think she finally found her match."

  Abby had liked Rod and, more, she liked Sydney with Rod. Sydney found in Rod a kindred spirit. Abby remembered them always laughing, and when they weren't laughing they were kissing and openly groping each other.

  "To tell you the truth," Sebastian laughed, "I had a crush on her until I was a teenager. She was just so...sexy."

  Abby nodded. "Oh, I know. I practically had a crush on her, and not just because she was beautiful, but so alive. When she walked into a room, she lit it on fire. My mom loathed her."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, she was insanely jealous of Sydney, had been since childhood from what I gathered."

  Abby pictured the sour face that her mother made whenever she spoke of her sister.

  "I get that," he said, taking a drink directly from the bottle. "Siblings that are so different are bound to clash."

  "How about you and Claire? Ever fight?" Abby had almost not asked the question, afraid that the mention of Sebastian's murdered sister would send him into a funk, but he smiled and shrugged.

  "Sure, when we were young. We fought over the remote control and who got the toy out of the cereal box and dumb stuff like that. There was never real animosity though. She was four years younger than me so we spent most of our lives in different phases. By the time she hit the hard part of puberty, I was a young adult and so on. When our parents died, everything changed. She became this innocent child that I had to protect and then, when she learned that she was a witch, our roles were almost beginning to reverse. She grew defiant and, honestly, stronger than me. It freaked me out, but still we didn't fight. We just started to grow apart."

  Abby nodded, understanding, but not. She didn't have siblings and, though she longed for them as a child, she felt grateful too. Her mother always appeared so preoccupied or worse, too occupied. Abby moved from the white hot beam of her mother's gaze into the cold, dark shadows without a lot of happy medium between the two.

  "Isn't it strange that we were all in the Astral Book of Shadows?" Abby said, chewing a strand of hair. "I mean Claire, Devin and me."

  Sebastian nodded.

  "Yeah. Do you remember Adora, the witch I told you that discovered Claire? She constantly stressed paying attention to synchronicities. Those conversations have stuck with me more than anything else she said. It didn't have the same affect on Claire though, and I think if it had..."

  "She wouldn't have fallen for Tobias."

  Sebastian grimaced at the sound of his name.

  "Yes, she might have recognized how eerily convenient it was for him to come into her life and be so comfortable with the witch stuff."

  "Maybe she just wanted to believe that she could have that too—the magic and the love."

  He looked up sharply at Abby and she frowned down at her hands.

  "Are you afraid of that, Abby? That you can't have both?"

  She bit her lip and returned his gaze, not wanting to admit that she felt exactly that.

  He rubbed the stubble on his chin, frowning and then seemed to change his mind. He scooted across the blanket and pulled Abby into his lap. He wrapped his arms around her waist and she caved into him, watching a seagull swoop towards the water far in the distance.

  His breath was hot in her hair and, when she tilted back to look at him, his lips found hers and pressed hungrily against her mouth. She kissed him back, suddenly feeling as if he might slip away and be gone forever. They both grew more desperate, tugging at clothes, until they were nearly naked, legs and arms encircling the other. He slid on top of her and his eyes looked starved as he pressed his face into her hair and breathed her in.

  ****

  Dafne watched them making love, but felt nothing. Their bodies were one, a single trembling flesh and, had she wanted to, she might have remembered a similar love in her own life so long ago that it no longer belonged to her at all. Instead, she closed her eyes and began to chant. She drew the heavens down to meet her outstretched palms and the earth up to her lips and wove the beginnings of their collapse.

  In the empty space before her, she stitched their souls together and then, forcefully, she tore them apart, flinging their beams of light to the furthest reaches of the darkest night.

  "Not lost, but alone," she whispered. "Together no more, no more, no more."

  The fates had spoken and Dafne had taken it upon herself to rid Ula of the toxic parasite that had stumbled into her womb. She would eradicate it and cast the evil far, far away where it could find them no more.

  For an instant, the sky grew dark and venomous and Dafne jerked her head once to direct that shadow into the lovers. She saw it slip between them, undetectable, like a breath of air.

  The wind blew her cloak around her and something poked at the back of her head. She batted it forcefully away. It struck the ground and her eyes followed the crumpled shape of the paper bird as it tumbled over the cliff's edge to the rushing water below.

  Chapter 2

  Lydia wandered into the dining hall the following morning. A tired Sebastian stared irritably into his coffee.

  "Where is everybody?" she yawned, grabbing a cinnamon roll and plopping down across from him. She eyed him wearily, taking note of his rumpled t-shirt and tousled hair. It was typical Sebastian attire, but somehow that morning he seemed even more disheveled than usual.

  "Not a clue," he told her, picking at a plate of scrambled eggs and not looking up.

  "Long night?"

  He glanced at her, as if seeing her for the first time and then gave
a curt nod. "Nightmares."

  "I get that," she told him, pulling her knees to her chest and hugging them tightly. Her pajamas were covered in small red monkeys, a Helena purchase, and she picked absently at their glittery faces.

  "Do you ever feel like something comes in and takes over at night? Some night monster just creeps in while you're off swimming on the moon and you wake up with this whole other being inside you?"

  Lydie crinkled her brow and shrugged.

  "Sometimes Oliver sticks my finger in water while I'm sleeping to try to make me pee," she told him, pretty sure that she was missing the mark.

  Sebastian didn't respond, but instead stood abruptly and left the hall, taking his plate with him.

  He returned to his room and sat on the edge of his bed, considering his drawer of tinctures, but not feeling moved to take anything. The dream had been vivid and terrifying, but, in the light of day, its edges were blurred and grainy.

  Claire had come to him. She pleaded for help, insisting that she was trapped, until he avenged her. Where had they been? In a cave? He knew only that it was dark and wet and he had been afraid. It was a strange dream, like nothing he had ever experienced, and he could not shake the feeling that it was real and that Claire had been calling out for his help. He held tightly to her plea.

  Abby had been gone when he rose from sleep. She had stayed in his room the night before, both of them clinging a bit longer to the sweetness of the previous day, but when he awoke to an empty bed, he did not go find her. He needed to contemplate the dream and Abby wouldn't get it. In fact, he felt strangely convinced that she wanted to prevent him from helping Claire. It didn't make sense. She had never implied such a thing, but something in the pit of his stomach demanded that he keep the dream a secret.