Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  Abby opened Rod's laptop and typed in Sydney1. Rod clearly did not follow safety measures with his electronics. Sydney1 had been his password years earlier when Abby visited. She opened the web browser and searched 'Aubrey Blake witch.' It was the same search that she had performed nearly two months earlier, on the very day that she and Sebastian almost lost their lives.

  She found the site History of Magic and clicked it open. The same graphics appeared with stars falling across a black screen and then, pixel by pixel, the image materialized. She saw Aubrey first, her brilliant red hair, black and white in the picture, stuck wildly from her hood. She scanned the other faces. In total, eleven people stood together, their arms linked. Two men flanked Aubrey on her left and right, both grinning beneath their dark hoods. They all stared at the camera with a kind of exuberance that electrified Abby. She laughed in spite of herself and felt their energy travel the distance of time and space to meet her in that modern loft where she sat alone, connecting to them through a computer screen.

  She studied each face and when she came to the thin, narrow featured woman who stood four people to Aubrey's left, she grew cold and still. Dafne stared back at her—Dafne of the coven of Ula—not some ancestor, but Dafne herself. Her dark eyes were unmistakable, though different, lighter and filled with joy. She held the same elation as every other witch in the picture and Abby knew that all, but three of them, were witches. She could see an unmistakable aura of glittering light surrounding the witches.

  She did not recognize the other faces, and yet she did. She felt the resonance of their bond and, despite the warm room, she shivered and wrapped her arms tightly across her chest.

  ****

  Oliver spent the day in the lake, cutting through the frigid waters between the island and the shore until he grew too exhausted to go on. He stumbled up the sand dune embankment on the north side of the island and fell asleep, his body hot beneath the rising moon.

  He awoke to Lydie beside him, gently pooling sand up over his feet, ankles and calves.

  "What are you doin,' Lyds?" he asked sleepily, shivering suddenly against the steadily declining temperature.

  Lydie wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Oliver wore only his damp swim trunks.

  "Heating you up," she said, adding more sand and then starting on his thighs.

  The sand felt good, warm, and Oliver knew that Lydie drew on her element of fire to heat the sand. He let his head fall back to the earth and stared up at the night sky.

  "Waning moon," Lydie said, holding her index finger and thumb up to the sliver of moon above them. "Waning witch," she added.

  She was recalling an old nursery rhyme that spoke of the witch's power waning and waxing with the moon. It might have been a nursery rhyme, but it was very true for many witches, the women especially. Oliver rarely noticed a decrease in power when the moon waned, but he had witnessed it in Dafne on more than one occasion.

  "I have to go after Abby, honey," Oliver told her, sitting up and wrapping an arm around Lydie's tiny back.

  She gazed into the dark night and he felt her shudder.

  "Hurry," she said.

  ****

  Abby checked her mirror one more time. She wore an oversized black coat with a white hooded sweatshirt underneath. Her hair was tucked beneath her hood and a pair of Sydney's gaudy sunglasses covered most of her face. She did not sense danger in Trager, otherwise she never would have risked a trip to the grocery store, but she was starving and wanted a little human contact, even if it only included telling the cashier to have a nice day.

  She wandered the aisles in distraction, filling her basket with granola bars and yogurt. She spotted the fruit and hurried over, already craving the sweet produce that Michigan could no longer deliver roadside as winter approached.

  She reached for a pomegranate. Her hand brushed against a woman also reaching for the fruit. Abby pulled back abruptly, as if burned. She blushed, embarrassed by her reaction. The other woman had barely touched her, but Abby had felt a jolt just the same.

  She turned to the woman and gave her a wan smile, hoping to diminish any concern that her recoil might have caused. The stranger stared at her with intense curiosity. Her clear gray eyes locked on Abby's and she tucked a strand of her short blonde hair behind her ear. The woman opened her mouth, as if to speak, and then a young girl with red curls tugged on her skirt. She jumped, startled, and gave Abby a quick nod before she walked away, holding the child's hand. The woman dropped the pomegranate into her child's small red cart next to a stuffed, purple kangaroo.

  "Fruit of babies?" the little girl asked her mother, touching the pomegranate.

  "Symbol of rebirth, honey," she told her daughter.

  The woman nuzzled the girl and smoothed the curls back away from her forehead. Before they moved down the next aisle, she turned once more to Abby and gazed at her for several long moments.

  Abby waited and then she replaced the pomegranate in her own hand and, abandoning her basket, followed the woman. She walked to the front of the grocery store and stood by the drinking fountain, occasionally dipping her head to take a drink.

  She closed her thoughts, as Elda had taught her, and acted on intuition alone. If her brain was allowed control, it would demand that she consider every possibility for the shock that this woman's touch had passed to her. She would get lost in fear and paranoia and, in that moment, she needed only to move, to breathe and to move.

  When the little redhead squealed in delight that her mother caved and bought her a candy bar, Abby slipped out the side door and jogged quickly to her car. She slid in and turned the key, watching in her rear view as the woman left the store. She bent over and pushed the little girl in her tiny cart across the lot. The child stood in the cart, clutching the sides, her kangaroo dangling from one armpit. The woman pushed her fast and the child's red curls blew out behind her and they both laughed. They stopped at an older blue pickup and the stranger loaded her daughter into a car seat.

  The woman drove across town and then turned onto the same winding forest road that Abby had driven a thousand times on her way to her Aunt Sydney's house. However, when they came to Sydney's driveway, the blue truck passed it by, eventually turning into a narrow dirt drive. Abby passed the drive and then circled back once, looking, but seeing only where the weedy path disappeared into trees. A series of mailboxes marked the drive, which meant multiple houses were located there. Abby parked in Sydney's driveway and returned on foot.

  She crouched in the woods and watched. Abby observed several small stone cottages along the rocky Lake Michigan shoreline. The cottages formed a half moon around a large fire pit. . Beach chairs and benches lined the pit, despite the late season. Abby could see a few wine bottles nestled in the sand near the chairs and stacks of wood on each of the cottage's porches. She could not tell which home the woman had entered because the driveway simply formed a grassy roundabout with several cars parked along its perimeter.

  Abby remembered the cottages, but only vaguely. She recalled Sydney pointing them out from the boat one summer when they were out trolling in the lake with Harold, Sydney's first husband. Harold had mostly dozed off, his pole unattended, while Sydney steered and Abby hung over the bow searching for fish in the clear water.

  "They're ripe with history," Sydney had told an eleven years old Abby, veering the boat closer into shore. Abby remembered the strange group of women she had seen that day. They waded in the water, laughing and talking loud, but they wore long dresses that floated on the surface like blue and orange and red lily pads. Several of them waved to Sydney as they passed and, when Abby asked why they were swimming in their clothes, Sydney had told her 'because during the day they can't go naked.'

  Abby stood now, almost waiting to see that same group of colorful ladies, like a bouquet of flowers, fanning out into the frigid autumn waters. But the cottages remained silent and still, other than the tendrils of creamy gray smoke that drifted from two of the chimneys and disappeared into the o
vercast sky.

  Abby looked up, startled when a glob of red curls darted across the yard in her direction. The child had barely left the house and, like a blood-hound, she seemed to know exactly where Abby stood. Abby stalled for only a second and then, pushing off with her right foot, practically ran straight up the tall pine tree in front of her. She paused on a series of thin branches fifteen feet in the air and watched the little girl run into the woods below her, stopping immediately. Abby expected her to look up, but she merely gazed deeper into the tress. She hummed a low haunting melody and Abby watched her, mesmerized.

  "Ebony, Ebony, where are you?" her mother's voice rang out and Abby recognized the voice of the woman in the grocery store.

  Abby returned to Sydney's house, but did not go in. Sydney knew the people in those stone cottages, but how? Abby needed to speak with someone that knew about Sydney's life in Trager City.

  Abby rested her forehead against the wall and groaned. She would have to return to Lansing and talk to her mother.

  ****

  Sebastian sat on Isabelle's couch and sipped his tea, heavy with milk and sugar.

  The hospital had been a nightmare, considering the staff were busy with people who actually needed their help and could hardly be bothered with a young, clearly healthy, man who'd forgotten his identity. When Sebastian finally made it into a doctor's office, the physician merely asked him a few questions, probed his head for bumps and said that his memory would likely return in twenty-four hours. The doctor further implied that Sebastian was either a con artist or had consumed too much alcohol the night before and would remember clearly when he slept off his hangover.

  He stripped down in Isabelle's bathroom, again searching every inch of his clothing for some identification. He found nothing. He put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that belonged to Isabelle's father. The pants barely reached his shins and the t-shirt hugged too tight around his chest, but stylish clothing was the last thing on his mind.

  "I thought I might call around and see about costume parties," Isabelle told him when he returned to her sitting room.

  "Costume parties?" he said absently, staring out her window at the small balcony adorned with chimes, ceramic fairies and a single purple lawn chair.

  "Yes, your clothes," she trailed off.

  He nodded. His clothes were extremely strange. They added yet another element to an already exhausting range of possibilities. In a black room, every corner, crevice and wall offered more space to discover, but also to ram your head or knee against.

  "I can't thank you enough," he told her, taking her hand and squeezing it.

  She squeezed back and smiled, revealing a dimple on her left check.

  "I want to help you," she told him seriously.

  Chapter 14

  August 7, 1908

  "He can't be serious," Dafne told Aubrey, shaking her head knowingly. "He's grieving. No one would possibly believe that tale."

  Dafne and Aubrey sat side by side on the porch swing that Henry had fashioned from a fallen maple. The western sun shone through the dense forest, mostly empty of its leaves.

  "That's what I'm saying to you, Dafne. People are believing it. They're looking at me cross everywhere I go. I didn't sell a single poultice at the market yesterday or the day before..."

  "It's a dry spell, that's all." But Dafne felt her pace quicken as she spoke. They no longer lived in a world of witch accusations and terror, but small communities bred paranoia better than most and, though a life might not be taken, a livelihood easily could.

  "I wish to believe that," Aubrey whispered, clasping her hands in her skirt and rocking back in the swing. Worry lines creased her forehead and her bright green eyes shone with fear.

  "We're the powerful ones," Dafne told her, urgently squeezing her hand. "If anyone owns this town, it's us."

  "You're leaving! You and Tobias are as good as gone."

  Dafne bit her lip and shook her head.

  "Not yet we're not, and we're all in this together. All of us. We'll see everyone Saturday night and then we will know what to do. Surely Celeste can look into the days ahead and put your mind at ease."

  Aubrey shook her head.

  "No one has seen Celeste in days. I went by her cottage and not a soul in sight, the doors and windows closed up like the cold season had fully come."

  Dafne considered this with a shudder. As a seer, Celeste saw visions of the future. However, she fell frequently into such overwhelming dread that she vanished for months at a time. Her last premonition had occurred just two weeks before the death of her young sister and she still had not fully recovered.

  "She would not simply leave though. If she foresaw something bad, she would have told us..."

  "Her visions are not helpful right now, anyway," Aubrey continued. "They're too unclear, there's no focus. I need a source for all this rage directed at us. Something is giving it life."

  Aubrey had first complained of the community suspicion a week earlier, five days before Solomon died. She noticed strange looks from neighbors who'd been loyal customers at the weekly market. Henry also noticed fewer patients at their free health clinic.

  The situation had grown much more sinister since Solomon's death. Jonas, Solomon's father, had accused Aubrey of creating his son's illness through witchcraft. He had even brought charges against her. This, of course, terrified Aubrey because witch hunts were not all that far in the past and she was, after all, a witch. But it was less the townsmen than the darkness that scared Aubrey. She had told Dafne that she sensed a much larger, much more sinister force at work in Trager and that the evil appeared to be flowing right towards her.

  Dafne had been so lost in her reverie with Tobias, she had barely acknowledged Aubrey's stories. Now she realized that Aubrey was right, the issue was escalating.

  "Something bad is coming," Aubrey said, pulling her shawl tighter against her body.

  "No," Dafne disagreed, hopefully. "This feeling will blow over soon. It's a strange time, that's all."

  Chapter 15

  "Tell me about Trager," Abby asked her mother. They sat at the same chipped Formica table that Abby had eaten cereal at every morning for the first eighteen or so years of her life.

  It was strange returning to her childhood home. Strange, not merely because the train of her life had leaped off the tracks and was now careening across glacial mountains and thorn filled valleys without any tracks to speak of, but also because Sydney's inheritance had clearly left her mother confused. Gone were the spider-webbed dishes with their little blue pastel edges, replaced by heavy Asian themed bowls and plates in smoky blacks and vibrant reds. The dishes looked foreign against the faded sunflower shelving paper in the cupboards. The living room had transformed from a jumble of plaid and floral sofas and chairs to a chaotic menagerie of ultra-modern leather foot stools butted against antique chaise lounges with gilded legs and arms.

  Abby had attempted to enter through the garage when she arrived, but nary a footpath existed among the boxes of old and new. There were sagging cardboard boxes, black marker neatly expressing their contents, while other perkier boxes stood upright and revealed new purchases such as the Kessler 89X2000 Super Sucker Vacuum Cleaner. It was unopened, but already collecting dust betrayed by the shafts of sunlight that streaked in through the single unblocked window.

  The entire house reflected her mother's conflict over what to get rid of and what to bring in. Even Becky's attire revealed her jumbled state of mind. She wore shiny black leggings with peek-a-boo black heels beneath a heavy moth-eaten purple sweater that Abby had seen her in a thousand times before.

  Becky sighed, lit a cigarette, and brushed a hand through her tangled hair. Tired would have been the compliment of the century. She appeared haggard and Abby tried hard to ignore the gnawing guilt that perhaps she had played some part in her mother's unraveling.

  "We didn't live there for all that long..." Becky started, less unnerved by Abby's question than exhausted by the effo
rt of answering it. She took a drag and blew the smoke straight up, watching it curl and fan out beneath a ceiling spotted with watermarks.

  "Where's Dad?" Abby asked. She wanted to talk about Trager and get to the issue that had brought her back to Lansing, but she could feel his lack of presence and it didn't seem as though he'd run out for coffee creamer.

  Becky looked up at her and her red-rimmed eyes held her gaze for only a moment before she broke away and stared distantly at the small kitchen window.

  "He left a week or two ago. Said it wasn't working. Blah, blah, blah," Abby's mother waved her hand dismissively and snorted. "Says I need professional help."

  Abby took a deep breath and forced her head to stay steady rather than nod an affirmation to her mother's comment. She had believed that her mother needed psychiatric help for most of her life. Extreme bouts of depression coupled with manic cleaning or buying frenzies had left both Abby and her father in the throes of an emotional tornado that never calmed for more than a few weeks before again gaining momentum and wreaking havoc on everything in its path. Abby's dad had gotten off easy in some regards. As a Realtor, he spent much of his time away. He offered a hundred excuses—showings, schmoozing clients, networking, late at the office. His evasions came so readily that Abby could rattle them off before he even called to say he was going to miss dinner or brunch or that school function that Abby insisted both her parents attend. He wasn't negligent exactly, just unable to face the life that he'd chosen. So he went through the motions, but opted for something else instead—work.

  Many times Abby had wondered why he stayed or, more importantly, why he ever signed on to begin with, but hers was not a communicative family. Gleaning the tiniest shard of family history was like tapping a palm tree for maple syrup. Her mother's reactions had generally ranged from suspicion to outright dismissal when Abby probed about her life before her only child was born. Her father offered tidbits here and there, but rarely held a conversation beyond ten minutes and returned his gaze to a television show or newspaper article.