"I can't take this," she said between sobs. "I can't take any more of this."
Oliver stood behind her, his hands resting on her chair back. He had tried to rub her shoulders, but she'd batted him angrily away. She didn't want to be touched and she didn't want to be soothed. She wanted Sebastian. She wanted him to walk into the room and ask Abby to reverse the course of their lives. They would walk backwards out of the castle, row backwards across the lake and, instead of fleeing to Ula after the Vepars attacked them, they would hop on a flight to Australia and and live out their days at the beach.
The thought made her cry harder.
"We will find out what happened to Sebastian," Faustine told her feebly. The look of helplessness in his face unnerved them all.
"You have to find out for sure if he's dead," Abby insisted, her eyes going to Faustine's and then back to Elda's. "There must be some way. Can you go to the Pool."
"It calls out to us, Abby," Elda told her gently. "It's not a choice. It's a doorway that is only open to witches who have a message on the other side."
"But why is he dead?" she wailed, doubling over with an agony she had never known. "Who killed him? Tobias? Did Tobias kill him?"
Elda and Faustine exchanged a look, but neither spoke.
Abby picked up her teacup and threw it across the room where it smashed against one of the bookshelves. She stood from her chair and ran out of the library and out of the castle, welcoming the moonless night.
She walked for hours. She walked the woods, the floating garden with flowers in night bloom, and the edges of both lagoons, up and down the sand dunes. She cried through it all and sometimes she stomped the flowers and kicked the trunks of the trees and twice she sat on the ground and cried so hard that she thought she might actually damage some part of her brain from the sheer force of her sobs.
She crawled down to the outcropping of rock where she and Sebastian had made love only weeks before. She began to talk to him. She asked him about his first kiss and his favorite kind of candy and what he wore for Halloween when he was ten years old. She told him that she once stole panties from a department store because her mother wouldn't let her buy thong underwear. She described how much she hated the third grade because her mother bought a sewing machine from an infomercial and insisted on making all of Abby's clothes herself. Most of her smocks looked like pillow cases with neck and arm-holes cut into them.
"My best memory though?" she continued, growing drowsy, "was the first time that I saw you. I remember your Pink Floyd t-shirt and this huge curl hanging in your eyes and I think the whole world opened for me right then. You know what else? I think you're the reason I found my power. It was you all along..."
She rested her head on the grass and closed her eyes.
****
"We must be able to do something," Oliver said angrily, slopping his coffee onto the tablecloth.
Bridget swept her fingers over the stain and it disappeared. Elda smiled at her apologetically.
"Oliver, you know better than that. We are witches, not gods. Some things must be endured and accepted. Pain is part of the process and..." she held up her hand to silence his interruption, "we all experienced some version of what Abby is experiencing now. You know this."
"Do you hear yourself?" he asked, unable to control his temper. "Someone murdered Sebastian. Something plucked him from a party filled with a thousand witches and murdered him!"
Bridget stood and began to clear their cups from the table. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she seemed close to breaking down. Elda waited until she left to answer him.
"Of course I understand the gravity of our situation Oliver. We all do, but we must not rush. Maybe this is a single incident. Or perhaps Sebastian's death is the tip of an iceberg that has not yet been revealed, but we cripple ourselves with assumptions. Faustine and Max are at Sorciére at this very moment. They will know more when they return and then perhaps we can go forward."
Oliver wanted to argue, to demand, as Abby had done, that the coven do something more, but Elda was right. The calling came with great sacrifice. He had lost much and his loss barely compared to the others. He didn't know the depths of their sacrifice and yet he could not remember a time when he felt as powerless as he did in that moment. Worse yet, he felt guilty because some small part of him had rejoiced in Sebastian's disappearance. Maybe that same part rejoiced in his death. He saw Elda watching him and looked shamefully out the window.
He could not reconcile his growing feelings for Abby. He tried to fight his desire to get closer to her, but it continued to live. Sometimes it felt like the little devil on his shoulder calling out to him to steal her away, but the core of him knew better. In his pure heart, loving Abby meant loving Sebastian because she had chosen him. When love took form, the individual no longer existed without the whole. Any separateness was merely an illusion.
****
After nearly seventy-three cups of tea, Helena pressed her face into her palms and started to cry. For hours she scoured the tea leaves, divining the past and the future. She asked for guidance, but received only jumbled images. Never in her life had the leaves been so unclear.
"Or maybe it's me," she said aloud.
"Or maybe it's Ula," Bridget said from the doorway, startling Helena.
Bridget sat next to Helena at the small kitchen table stacked with cookbooks, but rarely used for eating. She looked at the mound of wet leaves Helena had hurriedly dumped in her quest for the truth.
"You think there's something wrong at Ula?" Helena asked, searching for a moment of stillness to feel the energy of the castle. She expected a buzzing, an aliveness, but a strange silence settled over her.
"Yes, you feel it now. Like a vacuum? It's as if we've been sucked into a black hole..."
Helena nodded and looked again at the cup before her. The leaves had formed a chaotic shape that resembled something like a feather.
"I've seen that," Bridget told her, peering into the cup. "A feather, a black widow spider, a hang-man's noose. I've been getting bad omens for weeks..."
Helena felt a sinking feeling and she turned to face Bridget. She didn't even need to ask the question and Bridget nodded.
"Just like before..."
Chapter 8
"Abby, you're naked!" Oliver screamed, rushing through the rain toward her.
She barely registered his voice beneath the water pelting her body. She was naked, naked, covered in goosebumps and writhing beneath the treacherous sky in agony and desperation. She had not returned to the castle all day, but instead stood at the cliff edge and wished to die along with Sebastian. As she attempted to accept that he would never return, the thought of spending another moment at Ula made her skin crawl.
Her heart was heavier than the wet, cumbersome sand beneath her, and split into more pieces than there were grains along the shore. She cried and the rain took it and swept her tears into long snaking rivers down her trembling body.
She could have succumbed to the power. Her spirit would have ripped her from the egoic pain of her loss and catapulted her into a lightning storm of energy. But she refused its beckoning fingers. She refused the thoughtlessness and peace. Instead, she imagined him. She held him in her mind in a perfect memory that can only really exist as a memory and she rocked on her toes beneath the thundering sky.
When Oliver tried to take her hands, she pummeled his chest until he released her. He did not know what to do, but stood, watching her in confused awe.
She was wild, hair wet and ravished and curled around her head. Her body was lean and slick and powerful. He saw her muscles, taut, the veins in her forearms twisted and blue in her translucent flesh. Her brown eyes had taken on the yellow of the storm and they flashed from their teary pools.
He turned to the castle, hoping to see Elda or Faustine running to his aid, but no one came. The castle loomed beyond them, the heavy wood door closed to the lashing winds. He could almost imagine them hovering by windows, staring nervously at th
e spectacle of Abby at the lagoon edge, naked and raging.
She blamed them. She blamed all of them and her accusations, though not voiced, struck them equally. They could have sedated her, forced her into the library to thaw before the fire, but she was not bound to their coven. She was free, limitless, and her energy rebuked them. Only Oliver could get close and, though she did not fight him with her power, she fought him with her fists.
"Please," he said weakly, holding out his hands to her, palms toward the sky.
She did not even look at them, or at him. She turned and fled into the water, disappearing beneath the cold, gray surface. He nearly chased her in, took a step to do so, but her head popped up and she began to swim vigorously away from him.
"Leave her." The voice, Faustine's, was sharp and cut into this thoughts.
He turned and glared at the tower where he knew Faustine must be, reaching out to him telepathically. Faustine and Max had returned from Sorciére with nothing.
"No," Oliver thought and jerked his head from side to side.
But the voice came again, more insistent.
"She needs this, Oliver. She needs to grieve."
Oliver's jaw tightened and he took another fleeting look into the lagoon. He could see her already on the other side, emerging and running. Her naked body disappeared into the gnarled cherry trees beyond.
She ran and dove off the sand dune on the far side of the island. Her body flew into the pelting rain and she could see nothing, not the dark starless sky above or the black churning waters below. She did not immediately fall, but floated, connecting so deeply with her element that her physical body barely existed. Only when she remembered again her grief did her body regain its weight and allow the force of gravity to drive her into the icy waters below. She hit with full impact, ignoring all of her lessons to lighten herself before the water. Every cell of her body screamed out with the force of the blow and she felt white-hot pain as her lips split open and her head thrust back. The waves crashed and churned, twisting her in their roiling caress. She closed her eyes and let go to the water.
****
Oliver found her floating face up. The rain, now slowed to a steady drizzle, slid over her bruised face. The blood had washed away, but he could see where her skin had torn and already begun to heal. He leaned over the side of the rowboat and hooked his forearms beneath her armpits, pulling her easily into the boat. Her naked body shone in the moon's glow and her wet hair looked oily and dark against her pearl skin. The dive from the cliffs did not mean death for a witch, unless of course they blocked their intuitive shield on the way down and simply hit the water like a human would. He could see that Abby had done just that.
He laid her across his knees and carefully wrapped her in a flannel blanket. She did not stir and, as the boat rocked gently with the waves, her head lolled from side to side.
****
Abby awoke in an unfamiliar room. She watched the shadows from several flickering candles dance along the bulky wooden beams overhead. She could feel her nakedness beneath the heavy comforter and some soreness, but nothing else. Had she expected death? Maybe. At least physical agony, a worthy distraction, but her witch body healed in a special way so she had not even the respite of physical destruction to aid her. The deeper pain blotted out embarrassment, regret and any emotion born of thought.
She turned her head to examine the room. It was large and rectangular and quite different from the one that she occupied. The walls consisted of rough wood, unsanded and knotted. Where windows might have been, the room opened onto a large stone balcony. A gleaming wood burning stove sat in its center surround by black leather chairs. The bed she lay in was propped high, perhaps on a platform and wire cables connected it to the beams overhead. To her left, she saw a wall of Americana with posters of James Dean and Elvis, bookshelves lined with records, CDs, DVDs and even a desk with an enormous desktop computer. The bedside table, an overturned barrel, was jumbled with photo frames and she leaned toward them scanning the unfamiliar faces. She stared at each carefully finally landing on a tall red frame that depicted two young men in kayaks. Their tanned skin and light blond hair made them almost look like twins, but Abby recognized Oliver's wide blue eyes. The other man's eyes were hazel and his chin was softer. Abby realized that Oliver had a brother.
She propped onto her elbows and scanned the room for Oliver, but the meager furnishings left him nowhere to hide. At the base of the bed, he had left a pair of her black stretch pants and a long-sleeved black t-shirt, rightfully assuming that she would be uninterested in anything of color.
She moved slowly, sadly into her clothes, but she did not cry. The sockets of her eyes felt dry and she could not have mustered a tear if she willed it so. She found comfort in Oliver's room and in the small ways that he had held onto pieces of his human self. Since arriving at Ula, her own identity pre-witch had faded, and each day she found less room for her pre-coven hobbies. She suddenly missed her books and her cat Baboon and the ugly purple vase she'd made in pottery class in college. Those thoughts made her long for her mom and her dad and then for Sydney and finally Sebastian. The desert found rain again and her eyes welled up and spilled over. She buried her face in Oliver's pillow and cried until her hiccups subsided and she could find distance again.
****
Had it been hours or whole days since Sebastian had discovered himself at the edge of this wood? And where had he entered? More importantly, why? He could not recall. The walk was fuzzy, like the memory of a dream, and he leaned heavily against the rough bark of a tree. The tree was dead, strangled by a vine that wrapped and crawled from its base to its head. He still did not know how he lost sight of the group or the castle. It didn't make sense. He had been there, drunk and relishing the spectacle...and then what? Had he wandered out a door? Had there even been a door? His eyes itched, but his painted hands made scratching difficult. He wanted to remove the Dragon costume, but feared exposure. Was the costume bewitched? He searched again for the medallion that Elda had given him. A small gold coin that she insisted he carry at all times. She said that if he squeezed it, it would alert the witches of Ula that he needed them. Elda had explained to him that humans could not exist within the coven of Sorciére walls on the night of All Hallow's Eve. The witches ensured this by casting expulsion spells. He wondered if the charms that Elda placed on him somehow wore off. Is that what had happened? He couldn't remember.
When he was a boy of six or seven, he'd fallen very ill. A fever had ravished him for days and he had drifted in and out of dreams. His waking hours were plagued with visions, confusion and fear. He felt that now, the loss of time and the malleability of reality. Was he in France? When he looked down at his body, the costume only confused him more. Great sleek dragon's scales met his searching gaze. Every passing second brought confusion rather than clarity.
****
Dafne stole into Sebastian's room through a secret passageway that opened through his closet. The tunnels within the castle connected nearly every room. In her own room, though, she had bewitched the hole behind her mirror to hold an invisible shield that none but she could walk through. In Sebastian's room, she began to carefully collect all of the items that she had bewitched to ignite his split from Abby. His yearning to avenge Claire's death had offered the perfect bridge into his mind, but now she had to burn it.
She found the box beneath the bed. The shrine-like container missed only a single item, the small silver ring. She searched his drawers, the pockets of discarded clothes and even looked through the books on his shelf, but nothing. She tried to call out to the ring, seeking the magic she had placed upon it, but still it did not appear. She searched beneath the bed again, this time sliding her body under and looking up into the box springs—empty. She started to emerge and then the door to the room swung open and she watched with alarm as a pair of slippered feet walked in. She could see Abby's slim ankles as she moved to the bed and sat down. For several minutes, the room stayed silent and Dafne
held her breath, afraid to give herself away, and then she began to hear Abby gently sobbing above her.
"Are you gone?" Abby whispered, her words choked and sticky.
Dafne felt Abby lay back onto the bed and she could almost imagine her wrapping herself around one of Sebastian's old t-shirts and stuffing her face into his pillow. For an instant, the magnitude of all that she had done fell upon her and Dafne thought she might start screaming confessions into the box springs hovering inches from her nose. Then she remembered her own pain and loneliness. She remembered the screams of her friends in the woods and the dark cloud of grief that fell over Ula after three of their witches fell at the hands of Dafne's great love. With a grim finality, she closed a steel door upon her empathy and her guilt. She faced instead the gruesome fate that would have befallen them had she not eradicated Sebastian.
Abby cried for an hour and then she simply stood up and left, as quietly as she had arrived. Dafne wriggled out from under the bed and slipped back into the closet, taking all of the remnants of her deception with her.
****
"Hi," Victor said softly, spooking her in the cave of elders.
Abby had believed that she was alone. She had returned to her room at the castle. She traveled astrally to see Sebastian one last time.
"What are you doing here?" she snapped.
Victor did not look hurt. He merely cocked his head to the side and studied her.
"You're in pain..."
Inside of her, the grief wound tighter, but her astral body could not hold the form. She suddenly felt light, breathless and detached. For the first time since discovering Sebastian's body, her sorrow had abated.
"There, that's better, isn't it?" Victor smiled and reached a hand towards her. He could not touch her, but she felt his energy move through her.
Born of Shadows- Complete Series Page 41