"It can be done," Faustine said simply. He rarely spoke more than a few words at dinner, sometimes none at all, and Abby was surprised that he chose this moment to tune in. He looked down at her sideways, but his expression remained a riddle and Abby could not perceive his intentions.
"Great," she said with feigned enthusiasm, but Sebastian did not mirror the sentiment.
"It's so much fun," Helena mouthed at Sebastian, grinning.
He nodded at her, but his eyes wandered to the windows at the far end of the room.
"Last year," Helena started, "I went as Medusa. Elda enchanted real snakes for my hair. It was amazing."
"Yeah, that was cool," Lydie perked up. "Elda, could you enchant wings if I go as one of the winged monkeys from Wizard of Oz?"
Elda smiled and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.
"We'll see, Lydie."
****
After dinner, Abby and Sebastian returned to her room. He had brought a book about Vepar venom and said nothing as he settled onto Abby's bed and flipped it open.
"Do you want to talk? she asked.
Despite her growing intuition about the emotions of others, Sebastian's continued to elude her. Was he angry that she had not mentioned the Ball? Or merely so preoccupied with thoughts of Claire that he'd barely considered it?
He glanced at her over his book and shrugged.
"If you feel like we need to."
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the party. You've just seemed so...distracted."
The rain grew louder and Sebastian looked at the window and then at Abby expectantly.
"It's not me," she said.
"It's fine that you didn't mention it. We've both been busy with more important things."
His words stung since most of her energy as of late had been directed at the party and the conundrum it had created in her life.
"Honestly, Sebastian, I chose not to mention it because you haven't seemed interested in much of anything these last few days."
He cracked a cold smile and stared hard into her eyes.
"What does that mean?"
She hesitated.
"Okay, I said that wrong. You haven't seemed interested in the coven or in me."
He closed the book and rested it on his lap.
"I love you, Abby. I'm crazy about you, but this..." he held the book up, "...is my purpose in this world. I doubted it, but now I know and I have to pursue it all the way to the end."
"What does that even mean? Your purpose is to kill Tobias? Come on, Sebastian, what kind of purpose is that?"
"Could there be any greater?"
"Sure, how about love, Sebastian? Taking all of that energy and pouring it into love."
"This is about love," he whispered.
Abby felt her chest thicken, but she stifled the tears.
"Okay, fine. I'm going to run a bath." She left him in the bedroom where he had already returned to his book. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, watching the water pool, and wondered what had happened to their love.
****
"Dafne has been blocking me," Faustine said suddenly.
He and Elda were seated in the dungeon oratory. It was no longer a place of prayer, but an enchanted space meant to bind the energies of their coven.
"Dafne?" Elda asked, peeling her eyes from the Book of Shadows she had been vigorously scribbling in.
"Yes, I wasn't sure even a few days ago. But today I am. Her mind is not available to me."
"Even in the tower?"
He nodded.
"Perhaps you should ask Helena if she is sensing anything in Dafne," Elda told him.
She looked down at her book where she'd been writing Bridget's new anti-fungal remedy, but suddenly she could not concentrate.
"The energy has been off lately," she murmured, setting a palm out as if collecting rain drops.
"Yes. I thought that it was Abby and Sebastian and all of the chaos of late, but now..." he trailed off.
Elda set her pen down and stood, moving into the circle in the center of the room. The Magic Circle, marked by the runic symbol X, was a sacred space that the witches used to call forth and join their powers. It had been months since they had last performed the ritual, largely because they had all been preoccupied.
"Yes," Faustine responded to her thoughts. "We should gather and call the Magic Circle. We need to bind Abby into the coven."
Elda nodded, but felt uneasy. She was not sure that Abby was content at Ula and she knew surely that Sebastian was not.
"It is simply young love," Faustine concluded reading her mind. "It is volatile. I would not give it much thought."
"What about their connection? Helena witnessed Sebastian ripping an arm off a chair when Abby became upset."
Faustine furrowed his brow and nodded.
"I know, but I'm not so sure that the connection transcends the most basic link of loving one another. Have we not all experienced the passion, rage or pain of our partner?"
"Yes, of course, but to physically act it out?"
"It is worth investigating in the future, but right now my focus has shifted to Dafne and why she is putting a wall in front of my eyes."
"I will speak with her," Elda said, nodding in tune with her thoughts. "I will try to discern her intentions."
Both she and Faustine knew that Dafne was a powerful witch whose mind, when closed, would not be penetrated.
****
Dafne whispered a hurried incantation and the pile of items on her desk vanished. Technically they did not vanish, but became the exact color of the cherry wood, knots and all, making them nearly impossible to detect.
"You busy?" Elda asked, pushing open Dafne's bedroom door.
Dafne had one of the only dungeon rooms. She preferred it because the earth's thermal energy strengthened her own fire element.
"Uh, no, writing a spell in my journal." She held up her journal, a tattered old thing that was legible to no one but her.
"Anything interesting?" Elda asked sweeping into the room and scanning it quickly. She did not detect the flurry of items on Dafne's desk.
"Hardly. I've been trying to pull from the sun at night, but the energy is just...weaker."
Elda nodded, sensing that Dafne was eluding her, but did not want to give her suspicions away.
She lifted a pile of books from a leather club chair, one of two in Dafne's room, and sat down. Dafne, seated in the other chair, seemed unperturbed by Elda's visit and gave nothing away.
Elda felt the first stinging fingers of a headache behind her eyes and lifted her thumb and forefinger to massage the bridge of her nose.
"Not feeling well?" Dafne asked
"Just a little headache," Elda trailed off. She lifted one of the books and eyed its title. It was not unusual, a memoir written by a witch in another coven.
"Remedy?" Dafne asked, pointing toward a chest kept at the foot of her bed filled with tinctures and poultices.
"No, thank you, dear." Elda fingered the fabric on the chair and stole glances beyond Dafne, again searching for anything out of the ordinary. However, Faustine was right. Dafne had a steel wall up. Elda could not get a sense of her emotions nor could she catch a fleeting thought. It was intentional, she was sure of it, but why she didn't know.
Dafne was a moody witch and had been since her arrival at Ula nearly a century earlier. Despite her devotion to the coven and her steadfast adherence to the witch's rule, harm none, she never fully opened up to any of the witches, except for maybe Oliver, but Elda could sense that crumbling as he grew closer to Abby.
"How are you doing?" Elda continued. "I feel that we haven't spent a moment alone in ages..."
"Fine. I'm preparing for All Hallow's and trying to stay out of everyone's way," Dafne said shortly, glancing at her journal with a growing looking of impatience.
"Hmm...," Elda searched Dafne's face, but she returned Elda's gaze dispassionately.
"Was there anything else?" Dafne asked.
"No,
I don't think so," Elda said standing with a flourish of her dark robes. "But I'm here, Dafne. You can always come to me if you need to talk."
She left the room slowly, stealing another long glance around the space, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Chapter 4
Late one afternoon, Lydie climbed the steep sand dune that served as the westernmost border of the island. It was no more than fifty yards across, but it seemed to rise forever. The top offered a blow-out view of the vast lake beyond. The nearly vertical dune on the other side, long eroded into sandstone, was a dizzying drop.
"Into the clouds," Lydie whispered with a grin and a mostly unconscious thought of her dead mother whom she often imagined as residing in the clouds, but only the really white fluffy ones. The gray clouds never held more than rain.
Her feet were cold because she had foregone shoes to feel the sand a final time before fall took hold completely. Sand wedged beneath her toenails and it hurt, but she forged on, her ankles slicing through sugar and her feet creating small divots as she ascended.
The sky was blue and clear. She felt her breath growing short as she trudged up the dune. Generally, her superior strength made the climb easy, but nightmares had plagued her recently and she felt tired. She did not remember the nightmares exactly, only that Sebastian's face floated before her when she woke. She wanted to tell someone about the dreams, but everyone in the coven had seemed preoccupied and Oliver, her usual confidante, was spending all of his time with Abby or patrolling the mainland.
She reached the dune peak and dropped to her knees, lowering her face to the sand and resting her cheek against it. It felt like home, the home she'd shared with her parents in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Forest, and sometimes she climbed the island dune to return there. She sank both hands deep into the sand and massaged it with her fingers. With her eyes closed, she concentrated on one of the more poignant memories of her childhood home. In her memory, her father carried her up a sand dune on his shoulders. It was spring and cool so she wore fleece pajamas. Her mother laughed and ran ahead, cart-wheeling back down the dune to meet them.
As she guided energy into the image, she felt the stirrings of her astral body. It broke away from her physical body and a wave of seasickness washed over her as she traveled at light speed to the terrain of her childhood. She did not travel back in time. No, that was a feat that even witches, as far as she knew, could not accomplish. But suddenly she was there again at the wide expanse of sand dunes that dipped and soared like a great desert. In the distance, she saw the rippling waters of Lake Michigan, but she turned her astral body south and began to float back down the dune that she had climbed with her parents so many years before.
At the base of the bluff, she came to a dense wood. She wound her astral body through it easily. She had visited it before, several times, and though Max still believed that Lydie could not travel in her astral body, she could actually do it quite well. If she knew more about the capability of witches outside of her coven, she would have learned that very few witches could take their astral body to far away locations at will. Most of them could visit the sacred caves and areas nearby, but to travel elsewhere was a special skill which Lydie had mastered years earlier, but told no one.
In the woods, she paused, pulling memories out of the mind that rested peacefully on top of the dune at Ula. She remembered learning to climb trees in the forest. Her mother often climbed with her in a small sack that wrapped across her chest. Lydie knew what it felt like to be a monkey, a koala bear, an animal baby whose mother could leap from branch to branch. Her parents were not like the witches at Ula. They were lovers of life and they were kids in their hearts. They danced and ran and climbed and kissed. They inspired in Lydie the magic of life that had nothing to do with their powers as witches. Perhaps they were careless as Lydie had once heard Faustine call them, but she missed them desperately.
Lydie knew that Elda and Faustine were unaware of her memories. They did not realize how clearly etched in her thoughts were the years that she spent with her parents. They did not know that she longed to live a life very similar to theirs, a life that was not part of a coven, that had no rules and that considered joy to be as sacred as a Book of Shadows.
Moving out of the woods, she came to the small house that they had occupied as a family. The yard, if it could be called that, was overgrown with long stiff grass that would have scraped Lydie's feet if she'd been walking in her body. When she was a child, a baby really, her mother filled the yard with flowers and herbs. Much of the vegetation was magic, the types of plants that humans did not grow, but none of her parents' friends, many of who were non-witches, knew the difference.
Now there were 'No Trespassing' signs nailed to the trees, which had not been there when Lydie's parents owned the house. The signs were marred with bullet holes and the nails were rusted, but they clung on, making Lydie sad for the pain that the trees had to experience for some flimsy signs.
Lydie remembered playing in the yard at night and falling asleep to the cacophony of crickets and mosquitoes that inhabited the woods. Now, in autumn, they were all gone, back to their beds to sleep the winter away.
The house was a small two-bedroom cabin constructed of hand-hewn logs that Lydie's great-grandfather had cut himself more than a century earlier. Lydie drifted onto the wide porch that wrapped around the lower level of the cabin, noticing the sagging eave overhead and remembering the brilliant display of bird feeders her mother had hung there. She stopped at a window, thick with dust, and looked into the open space where the sitting area and kitchen remained. The house was mostly empty, except for the dust balls and a few pieces of old, moth-eaten furniture. Lydie scanned the walls, but no pictures hung there and hadn't for years. No one lived in the cabin because Lydie owned it, though Faustine kept all of the details private and Lydie never had the nerve to ask for more information.
She looked at the kitchen and the peeling white counter-tops dotted with tiny red flowers. She could see the rim of the heavy porcelain sink that her mother washed dishes in when she felt like being domestic and not using her magic. Lydie's dad always used magic when doing dishes. A simple incantation and the water became a churning well of suds. He often used the same spell when Lydie was in the bathtub and her rubber sea monsters all but came to life.
She floated along the exterior of the house, but felt her body pulling her back to the island. At first she resisted, wanting to enter the house and return to her room and to the crawl space that she had been rescued from, but already the vision was growing blurry. With a jolt and another wave of dizziness, she returned to the sand dune at the coven.
She was lying face down in the dune and, when she sat up, her back hurt from being folded in half. She shook her head and scanned the horizon, wondering what jarred her travel. At first she saw nothing except a few seagulls flapping angrily against the wind, which had picked up. She looked back toward the second lagoon, her gaze passing over the greenhouse and the cherry blossoms. From her vantage point she could see the castle rising a hundred feet above the highest island peak. There she saw a strange image.
Dafne was emerging from a high window on the one of the turrets that twisted into the sky. Lydie knew the turret as Faustine's tower, the space that he went to connect telepathically to the witches in Ula and to witches in other covens. He spent most of his time there, but the other Ula witches rarely visited the tower.
Now Lydie watched as Dafne climbed out of the window and stepped onto a tiny stone ledge, pressing her body against the castle walls and skirting the perimeter of the tower. When she disappeared around the back, Lydie lost sight of her.
She would have to tell Elda. She had sensed tension in the castle and though she hated to tattle, she felt a strong urge to relay what she had seen to one of the elder witches.
She began to climb down the dune, but saw Oliver racing up, his muscular legs pumping beneath his athletic pants.
"Ha, I thought I'd find you up here
," he laughed, diving into the sand next to her.
She giggled and sat down beside him.
"Let's go down that side." He pointed to the cliff side of the sand dune where the dune was a straight drop nearly thirteen hundred feet to the water below.
They had done the drop many times. Usually they started off running and jumping, but soon their legs scissored too quickly and they just fell the rest of the way. Oliver would hold her hand the whole way down and his lightness spell made their bodies practically dissolve into the water so that they barely felt the impact. The water would be cold, but they had only to grab a few bites of Bridget's Flaming Pepper Plants before they went in and they wouldn't even feel it.
"We better get the pepper plants," Lydie started, but Oliver interrupted her.
"Already got 'em." He held up two of the flaming peppers, both black, and handed her one.
"Down the hatch," he said and stuffed the pepper into his mouth, his face immediately glowing.
Lydie followed and forgot entirely about Dafne's strange trip outside of the tower.
****
Sebastian lay on the floor of his room and reached beneath the bed, pulling out the box that Abby had discovered. He was not happy that she had stumbled across it. He had barely looked at it and he didn't want her uncovering something that might prove valuable. He set the box on the bed and returned once more to the door, listening for footsteps on the stairs. There were none and, though he hated to do it, he turned the heavy bolt and locked it.
He had discovered the box in the dungeon in a strange room stuffed with unfamiliar artifacts He still did not know what led him to the box—intuition he thought—but something had drawn him to the room that day and it could not have been luck that it was unlocked. He wondered if Claire was communicating with him from the other side. His dreams of her had grown increasingly regular.
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