Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  "Dafne doesn't seem like the forgetful type," Abby told him.

  He nodded, reluctantly, but knew she spoke the truth. Dafne had been keeping secrets for a very long time.

  Abby pointed towards an opening in the dune grass. Lake Michigan lay beyond and, as they started down the slope toward the water, Abby began to feel lighter, even buoyant

  Oliver looked at her sideways.

  "Well, I see what all this water does for you..."

  She smiled and a shiver of pleasure ran through her at the intensity of the lake's energy.

  "I understand what you're saying," she murmured. "I've always felt connected to this space. When I left Lansing, I didn't think about a single other spot on earth. Trager was the only refuge. It was almost like I didn't even make the decision."

  "And that's what happens," he told her. "One day you're waking up every morning and punching the clock, kissing your girlfriend goodbye like you mean it, and the next day you're driving like a fiend toward some destination that suddenly feels more real than every person and experience of the previous seventeen years of your life."

  "Did you have a girlfriend?" Abby asked. "Before?"

  Oliver chuckled and ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair. Color appeared high on his checks, but only for an instant and then it washed away as if he willed it so.

  "Jamie," he said smiling. "Jamie with the sleepiest brown eyes you've ever seen and this ridiculous hair like silk almost down to her waist. I used to brush it and it made me..."

  "So in love?" Abby asked, losing herself for a moment.

  "So horny is more like it."

  They both started laughing and then the shoreline met their feet and a peaceful lull spread over them. The lake undulated in ripples of green and blue. The gray sky made the sandbars and drop-offs more visible and Abby recalled how it felt to look upon the lake as a child. Standing in that exact same spot with Sydney close at her side, she felt that all of the secrets of the universe lay in that sometimes tranquil, sometimes furious, water.

  Oliver took her hand and squeezed .

  ****

  Love of another is beautiful, but it is not wholly pure. It is dirtied with the mind, with possession, desire, fear and attachment. It is the darkness in that light that makes it the perfect portal for evil to enter. It is so easy to take the enormity of that emotion and feed the shadow. The shadow grows and grows until it swallows the light and the love disappears all together.

  Dafne had never spoken of her love affair with Tobias to Elda or Faustine. They did not probe—it was not their way—and she hid her past beneath an impenetrable shield of thought. Only Oliver had ever brought her to the edge of revealing her heart-wrenching story, but then Abby had arrived and with her, Sebastian, and the past had flooded back with excruciating clarity.

  Dafne walked the cliff edge, the castle rising behind her like the ominous all-knowing eye in the sky. She felt Faustine's curious gaze from his tower, but she did not look back. She braced her face into the cold November wind and allowed her thoughts to flow freely. Faustine could not read her. She had cut herself away from his searching mind, but allowed simple thoughts to float at the periphery to distract him. More deeply, she considered Sebastian.

  Indra had voiced concerns that the spells had failed and his memory had begun to return. Nothing concrete had arrived, but Isabelle claimed that he acted strangely, disappeared for hours at a time and had become rather guarded with her. Dafne did not question her own abilities, but she did question Sebastian's natural power. Both Elda and Faustine had alluded to an unnatural strength in Sebastian, comments that had only driven Dafne deeper into her belief that he was destined to be the next to rise in the Vepar Clan.

  He could not return. Her deception of the coven was unforgivable, and placing Sebastian dead in the Pool of Truth...well she preferred not to think what might transpire if her coven knew.

  She thought then of the Lourdes of Warning, exiled to her underground prison, tethered by an ancient spell of darkness and her own delirium. None of the others knew of her relationship with the Lourdes. Her web, now spun, could not be disentangled, only annihilated and what destruction would befall all of them if that occurred?

  Chapter 20

  August 1908: After the Fire

  Dafne wandered the beach like a soul trapped between this world and the next. She hadn't eaten in days. Her already thin body had grown gaunt and sunken. Her eyes looked out from two gray holes and the bottom of her tattered dress was still black with soot from the fire that stole the life of her best friend, all of her friends. She felt less than utterly alone, she felt dead, as if someone had sliced her down the middle and plucked her heart out, but replaced it with some dead thing that kept her body moving, but nothing else. The waves crashed or they lulled, the tide surged and retracted. Her bare feet crunched over shells and seaweed and dead fish and she walked on, oblivious to the blood and the soreness and the infections beginning to cause the fever that made sweat pop along her hairline.

  The sun rose and it fell and if she passed other beings in the land of the living, she did not see them or hear them or notice how they took a wide berth to the sickly girl at the water's edge. Her dark hair grew tangled and sand-filled in the wind.

  When Faustine and Elda found her, the walking had ended. She lay nearly dead in the tall dune grass so that if Faustine had not connected with her telepathically, they might never have discovered her there on the beach. She had no recollection of her saviors when she woke four days later in the healing room at Ula, swathed in sheer gauze and breathing the scent of some strange oil burning at her bedside. Elda had barely left her and she sat now, a book balanced on her knees and her eyes watching the young woman with interest and hope.

  Dafne blinked and, when she remembered, a long tremble rolled through her body and she started to gag and to cry. She flung herself off the bed and she clawed at the stone floor and wailed as Elda wrapped strong arms around her and cooed in her ear as if she were only a baby. When the crying finally ended, Dafne stared into the deep well of her pain and her past and saw a heavy iron lid swing down upon it, sealing it off as if it never existed at all. As Elda helped her back into the bed, a cool numbness fell over her. Deep in the pit of her belly, a tiny life shifted, but she shut her heart to it and fell asleep.

  Chapter 21

  Lydie wrapped her wool blanket more tightly around her shoulders and climbed the cold sand. At the dune ridge, she glanced back at the castle in the distance, hoping that no one watched her. Even if the other witches saw her, they would merely think that she was napping, though, they would likely find it strange that she napped outside on a cold November afternoon. She settled onto the sand, snuggling deeper into her blanket as the cold wind whipped across the water.

  She closed her eyes and waited.

  She woke again at another sand dune and began to drift down towards her childhood home. Suddenly the world whipped passed her in a blur. A thousand trees sped by and she found herself in an unfamiliar forest. Bright green ferns tittered on the ground beneath her. She heard voices and moved toward the sound. A woman's scratchy whispers pricked at some sensitive piece of her and she paused, scared. For a second, she wanted to flee back to her physical body, but a need to know urged her forward.

  In the distance, a bloom of bright red stood in stark contrast to the greens and browns of the forest. A red, sinister-looking weeping willow rose up from the earth with a cascade of scarlet branches reaching toward the ground.

  Lydie saw Dafne at the edge of the willow. Beneath her, stretched along a mossy red floor, Lydie noticed a woman. She moved closer, knowing that they could not see her in her astral form, but terrified still. Flesh hung form the woman's face and she propped her torso high on her hands like a Sphynx. Lydie wanted to look away, but could not seem to rip her gaze from the woman-creature's bent body. The bones along her spine jutted out through a soiled-looking pink dress. Her honey colored hair, out of place on her skeletal form, was push
ed over one shoulder.

  "I fear that my spells have been unsuccessful. I have removed his memory, but it seems to be coming back. Indra and I placed him in the Pool of Truth, but..." Dafne's voice trembled as she spoke. Though she gazed at the woman, her eyes darted into the forest as if she could only take the sight in small doses.

  "Blach." The creature held up a gnarled hand and coughed twice before continuing.

  Her gravelly voice crawled through Lydie's brain and she fought the urge to scream. The voice did not belong to a woman, but something ancient and terrifying. "Fools," she continued. "Such little fools you were a hundred years ago and you are even now. That's what happens to witches in covens, you know?"

  The woman turned slightly and Lydie glimpsed more of her face. She clenched her eyes shut against the vision. The ghastly face of a corpse sat upon the woman's slender neck. Her blackened lips curled back into the cavity of her mouth and, when she spoke, the hole opened to reveal a yawning emptiness.

  "You get weak, turn to mush." She shifted, her body pitching forward, and grabbed a handful of the slimy red moss that jelled between her fingers. "You don't defend evil from your stone palace, little witch. You let it in the front door." She began to cackle and the sound reverberated through the forest.

  "Drink Lourdes, you're time is short," Dafne told the woman, shrinking away. She looked as revolted as Lydie felt, but seemed to be trying to hide it.

  "Scared of the truth, are you?" the woman screeched. "Scared of this old dead face? What do you think you look like under all that magic? With that black soul eating you away?" She laughed again and then lurched to her feet.

  The woman-creature plucked a bottle from Dafne's hand and held it to her lips, drinking thirstily, her dark tongue lashing out at the mouth of the bottle like a lizard. The woman's face began to transform.

  As Lydie watched, the creature's face melted and reformed. The sagging skin grew pink and luminous. Full, sensual lips replaced her thin, wrinkled mouth. Her entire body shuddered and shifted until she became painfully beautiful. Lydie found the beautiful woman almost as impossible to look at as the creature.

  The witch, now stunning, cocked her head to the side and turned, her eyes roving over the spot where Lydie stood.

  'She can see me,' Lydie thought with horror.

  But the woman said nothing.

  "I need your help, Lourdes. I know that you don't want this anymore than I do. This curse will destroy us all. Their numbers here are already weakening us. Have you yourself not found your strength diminishing?"

  "It is not the Vepars you should fear," the woman told Dafne, smiling maliciously. "It's Kanti."

  Lydie saw confusion cross Dafne's face and she too wondered - Who or what was Kanti.

  She heard the question begin on Dafne's lips, but already the scene began to fade and she felt her astral form called back to Ula.

  ****

  Sebastian had been surprised when the man sitting in the chair opposite him, reached across the table and plucked a cigarette from his pack, lit it and casually leaned back in his seat.

  "Do I know you?" Sebastian asked hopefully, not minding the man's strange behavior if it meant a clue to his identity.

  "Yes, and I you," the man told him, his unnerving dark eyes settled on Sebastian's. He rested his oddly short arms on the table before him, clasping his long skeletal fingers together.

  The hair on the back of Sebastian's neck stood on end and he shifted in his seat, suddenly itching to be somewhere else.

  The man simply watched him, a curious smirk playing across his amused face.

  "So you do not remember me?" the man asked, taking a drag on his cigarette and releasing it through his nose.

  "He looks like a devil," Sebastian thought, and then chased the image away, unwilling to let go of any opportunity to find answers.

  "Everyone has missed you so much," the man said, suddenly leaning forward. His face changed from fascination to kindness and Sebastian forced a smile. This person truly did know him.

  The man cocked his head to the side as if picking up a sound from far away.

  "We should go," the man told him, standing abruptly and stubbing his cigarette on the table's edge. He dropped the butt on the ground and Sebastian started to pick it up, but the man stopped him.

  "Like this." He waved his hand over the butt and it vanished.

  Sebastian's jaw dropped and he started to look for it, but the man laughed and took Sebastian's shoulders in his hands, guiding him down the street.

  "I should tell Isabelle," Sebastian said, but the man encouraged him forward and Sebastian no longer felt like resisting. He followed the man to his car.

  ****

  "So you think the people in those cottages are involved in this?" he asked Abby, opening a large envelope stuffed with old yellowing pictures. "Why would they be keeping this stuff in Sydney's loft?"

  "That's what I don't understand. Unless they put it here so that I would find it? Something drew me here, Oliver. When I walked into this room, I felt a message waiting to be discovered."

  "How can Dafne possibly be a part of all this?" He looked again at the photo that Abby had shown him that included Dafne in the throng of witches standing in the night-time field. Though she looked much younger, and far happier than he'd ever seen her, she was unmistakable. "I just can't believe that she's intentionally deceiving us, Abby. There must be some other explanation." But his tone betrayed his suspicions. Dafne had been acting strangely ever since Abby and Sebastian arrived at Ula.

  "Do you think she had something to do with Sebastian's death?" Abby asked, her voice much smaller as she spoke his name. Baboon purred from a nest in the center of the bed and Abby stroked his ears lovingly.

  Oliver wanted to say no, but his heart knew better.

  "I hope not, Abby, I really do." He took her hands in his own and kissed them, surprising them both. A tear slid down her face and she turned her head so that he could not see her eyes.

  He wanted to draw her to him, bury his face in her hair and pull the pain from her heart, but her body warned him to stay away . He returned to the stack of papers and wondered why Dafne had loathed Sebastian so completely.

  "I've been asking the wrong questions all along," Abby said, lifting the box that her grandmother had left for her and holding it in her lap. "I just got lost in this idea that I was a witch and, I needed to know something, I would just know it. I went on that wild goose chase and almost got killed, and all along it's been right here. This history, it's buried here. When I first started searching for Devin's killer, I found this picture on the internet. Something led me to that and I totally disregarded it. I should have tried to understand why Dafne hated Sebastian. I should have questioned how all of this past played into what was happening."

  "You can't know until you know," Oliver told her, smiling wryly. "It's one of those things you learn to accept. The world is unfolding exactly as it has to, regret is wasted. The point now is to ask those questions and to follow them all the way in, find out what's hiding in the shadows."

  "I want to, but I still feel lost in this. Like it's right in front of my face, but I'm just not seeing it."

  "Well, we are witches." He smiled at her and winked. "Let's see what the universe is willing to tell us." He gathered up a bunch of the papers and set them on the bed. Then he proceeded to light candles, each from the flame of the last, and walked the room in a circle counter-clockwise, placing candles along the floor.

  He left the room and returned carrying two small crystal paperweights. He set them on the floor in the center of the circle.

  "Let's raise the vibration in here, huh?"

  He held out his hand and they settled on either side of the circle.

  "No mantras, no chanting. I'm thinking just a simple intention of guidance, yeah?"

  Abby opened her palms on her knees. Elda had taught her about meditation and lightening the self to connect with the less dense aspects of reality. Until that moment, s
he had almost forgotten that she was even a witch and that she and Oliver were not merely helpless pawns in the game of some faceless evil.

  They each closed their eyes. Abby felt pulled by her thoughts, but focused on a single white light at her third eye. She imagined the word guidance, spoke it in her mind, and visualized it before her. Eventually the meditation lost sight of its intention and she drifted, feeling her body sway from side to side. Somewhere far away a clock tower chimed and pulled them both back to the room.

  "Our closing gong," Oliver said, standing and stretching for a moment. "Now for our answer."

  He picked up the pile of papers from the bed, as many as he could hold, and briefly closed his eyes. Then he threw the papers out before him over the circle. They flew in all directions, floating toward the floor and Abby almost reached out, fearing that some of them might catch fire. Then, incredibly, their flight slowed and they began to organize themselves in midair until they had layered into several distinct piles.

  "Wow," Abby said.

  "Yeah, it takes a while in the beginning to remember that we have the whole universe to call on when we're confused."

  Abby grabbed the first stack of papers.

  "Look at the cover of all three first," Oliver told her. "Those are the places to start. If they're on the top, they need our immediate attention."

  On the top of the first stack, Abby saw a news article published just five weeks earlier claiming that the Trager City deaths were the work of a vampire cult. The next stack held the picture of all of the witches grouped together, Dafne and Aubrey nestled amongst them. The final sheet held an advertisement ripped from a magazine.

  "American Spirits?" Oliver held up the advertisement, which portrayed the black and white image of a Native American man smoking a peace pipe.